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DARK MIRROR
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DARK MIRROR
The Pathology of the
Singer-Songwriter
Donald Brackett
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brackett, Donald, 1951
Dark mirror : the pathology of the singer-songwriter / Donald Brackett.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 9780275998981 (alk. paper)
1. Rock musicHistory and criticism. 2. Rock musicians. 3. Rock musicWriting and
publishing. I. Title.
ML3534.B687 2008
782.4216409dc22
2008019907
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright 2008 by Donald Brackett
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008019907
ISBN-13: 9780275998981
First published in 2008
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the

Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.481984).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Mimi
The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the
most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the
most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only
for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror.
Marcel Proust
Table of Discontents
Prologue: No Home on the Range
Part One: Islands
Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter As Solo Artist
ix
1
Chapter 1 The Story Teller: Bob Dylan
11
Chapter 2 The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson
27
Chapter 3 The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell
41
Chapter 4 The Role Player: David Bowie
51
Chapter 5 The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull
61
Chapter 6 The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits
73
Chapter 7 The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello
81
Chapter 8 The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse
91
Part Two: Continents

Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter in a Partnership
107
Chapter 9 The Seduction Shouters: John Lennon/Paul McCartney
115
Chapter 10 The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
127
Chapter 11 The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/

Roger Daltrey
135
Chapter 12 The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel
147
Chapter 13 The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks
155
Chapter 14 The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin
163
viii
Table of Discontents
Chapter 15 The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White
171
Afterword: Ones Company, Twos a Crowd
191
Notes
201
Index
209
Prologue
No Home on the Range
The inimitable Elvis Costello once remarked, with typical sarcastic bravado,
that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. Now, far be it
from me to contradict one of our greatest singer-songwriters, not to mention
one featured as an island in my own book; however, some exception must
be taken to the talented Mr. Costellos observation. First of all, lets readily
admit that he is utterly correct, insofar as music and the songs they convey
are best appreciated in the temporal immediacy of the listening experience.
But, by reflecting on the songs origins, their blueprints so to speak, one can
often clarify how such songs occupy the landscape of both our culture and
our own personal lives. Thus, we attempt to imagine the biography of sounds
and visions and their ancestry in our lives.
True, writing about music just might be like dancing about architecture, but
it is also equally true that some architecture deserves to be danced tosuch as
Costellos own quirky songs, for instanceespecially when it seems so crystal clear that each song is also a kind of building, a building imagined to contain the message of the song itself, designed and constructed by the writer,
and delivered in his or her own distinctive voice. Costellos songs are little
houses that take our breath away. Songs which, as a friend of mine recently
told me, you can live inside of for a while.
But how and why do these talented but often tormented tellers of tall tales
speak on our behalf ? By telling us how they feel, they also somehow manage
to tell us how we feel. We still need an adequate analysis, certainly more than
that provided by the acclaimed author of Art and Artist, Otto Rank, of what
makes the most creative individuals in the singing-songwriting business also
Prologue
the most personally vulnerable and emotionally wounded, with evidence

culled from their own art form: the songs themselves. The talents and pathologies of singer-songwriters are manifested in the songs they write, through
their relationships with their partnerswhether creative or personaland
through their roles in the larger theatre of our popular culture. They somehow serve as our dark mirror.
Of course, poems and stories, especially when sung aloud, were the first
means of transmitting the magical contents of many diverse cultures, and
never more so than in the ancient traditions of preliterate societies. Poems
and stories are the telegrams one time in history sends to another one. Personally delivered. The process still works the same way, though the tools of transmission have changed.
The surviving poems and songs from the ancient eras, such as the Indian
Vedas (2500 BC), the Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh (3000 BC), and the Greek
tales of the Odyssey and Iliad (700 BC), are the earliest form of recorded cultural information that chronicles the lives and beliefs of peoples long gone.
Poetic songs contain the DNA of a culture and its mythical foundations,
whether prehistoric, ancient, or modern. Some songs even seem to predict
the future.
In preliterate societies, the epic poem was a means of transmitting vital
data into the future. In literate societies, the lyric poem, with its shorter and
more personal content, became the primary means of interpreting that history
and recasting it in subjective and emotional terms that resonated with the
readers own lives. In the twentieth century, the rise of the singer-songwriter
tradition led to a creative mutation fueled by the combination of social
wealth, entertainment, electronic media, and loud recording devices designed
to convey those messages to mass audiences.
Dark Mirrors motley crew of spiritual savants are the inheritors of a distant
tradition that first allowed them a format for their musings, but then each
genius alone is the motor that changed that tradition so dramatically that
we have to remind ourselves that they are indeed in the historic company of
Homer and countless others who performed a similar role for their own societies. Back then, Homer was a kind of primitive radio/television set that his
society tuned in to in order to learn about its roots and possible destinies.
And for us today? Who knows, perhaps even a controversial rap artist like
Eminem fulfills the same contemporary social role for us.
Today, gifted story tellers who sing are doing the same service for our contemporary, and global, societies: they are the mirrors into which we gaze to
see ourselves captured, contained, and reconfigured.
David Baker, an academic participating in a symposium in search of the
current lyrical trends with tendrils reaching back into the historic past, has
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xi
identified one of the most crucial aspects of todays chorus of voicesthat of

dealing with the problems between people. He chose to focus on the core
essentials that inform what we write about, sing about, and listen to: that
we mourn, that we ache, that we want, that we lie, that we forget, that we fail,
that we love, that we covet, that we deceive.1 Sounds like a catalogue of this
books subjects and their own oeuvre!
Baker pinpoints the main ingredients in the lyric form that construct a song
from the stuff of our everyday lives: The love poem and the problems of
passion, heartbreak and betrayal; the elegy, and the problems of death and
loss, or forgetting; the ode, and the problems of social rhetoric.2
Once again, a veritable menu of subjects some of todays songwriters have
explored for nearly half a century.
Baker also identifies other problematics within the lyric mode: the sublime, and the problem of beauty; the narrative, and the problem of time; and
the most important element at work in the poets toiltelling all of this in
the first person and in the present tense. Songwriters also manage to perform
one of the key jobs of all literary work: to enlarge a solitary existence. Baker
comments that such is the dream of the lyric in particular, that the self shall
be revealed and enlarged.3
This is the task that singers of stories achieve so well, so apparently effortlessly, and so seemingly endlessly in their grasp of the human heart. By
revealing and enlarging themselves, they somehow succeed in doing the
same for all of us. Indeed, most of the writers and performers written about
in this book set out with the same goal in mind, and they all achieved it with
varying degrees of success. The result is that by expressing how they feel,
they reveal how we feel, or how we might feel, if we could manage to cope
with the current issues in each of our lives.
Whatever the different styles and sensibilities of the artists being profiled,
they all share one element in commonthat of using emotionally raw content
and personal vulnerability as a vehicle for their art. They each communicate
for us by communicating to us, while we often communicate through them.
How is it that when we look inside the dark mirrors that these gifted contemporary singer-songwriters hold up for us we see not only ourselves, but
everyone else as well, especially the artists themselves, depicted with the
most extreme emotional intensity and yet the most accurate and forgiving
manner? All of the key subjects in this book are extremely well-known popular music celebrities, among them Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello,
Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Paul McCartney, and the late John
Lennon. Not to mention the tardy Amy Winehouse. All of them, despite their
obvious stylistic differences, share something in common which links rather
than separates them, and these links form the chain that ties these many
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Prologue
remarkably gifted but often troubled troubadours to all of our collective emotional lives.
Utilizing firsthand musical reflections on the nature of the singersongwriter psychology and occasional pathology and its consequences on
art and private life, Dark Mirror explores the intricate nature of isolation and
self-absorption in the singer-songwriters creative work. Singer-songwriters
ruminations have a magical way of encapsulating all of our own sentiments
and feelings. Yet all the singer-songwriters in this book (with the possible
exception of Paul McCartney) sing in an exotic and raw vocal stylea style
that one would not traditionally call reassuringand still their profoundly
unique voices appear to be the only ones capable of conveying their correspondingly unique messages to us. Indeed, some of them are downright
dented voices.
The fact that singer-songwriters often suffer from a deep sense of loneliness, associated with being the only one who can adequately sing and perform what they themselves compose, is a key element studied in this book.
Often, even those who write within a famed partnership compose for that
other voice exclusively, much to their own chagrin. The ironic danger being
explored is basically that of each performers inclination to sink solely into
self-absorption, expressing only what matters to him or her, while at the same
time, and strangely enough, managing to speak for all of us in a way that connects with what we all feel. Emotional wavelengths are superimposed
through songs.
Dark Mirror is divided into two principal sections: Part One delves into the
singer-songwriters who function primarily as solo artists; Part Two explores
singer-songwriters who function primarily as part of a team, and who
wouldnt write quite the same material for a different partner. The afterword
surveys those who function as members of a larger thematic community or
stylistic tribe, within which they share certain creative sentiments. In order
to clarify, or perhaps polish the songwriting mirror in question, this work will
intentionally avoid any pop psychologizing or projections of interpretive
meaning by drawing from the well of the artists own unique prose.
These artists words move us with the often simple but harrowing depth of
the singer-songwriters own idiosyncratic insights into the human condition
that we all share but which they alone can rhapsodize about so powerfully!
We seem to use many gifted songwriters as surrogates through which we
can travel to the edge without endangering ourselves personally. But to speak
to us of our own deepest emotions, paradoxically they must perforce make
records and sell them.
For some singer-songwriters, that is easier said than done. Dylan once even
compared making records to working in a coal mine, and at first one thinks it
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xiii
was just a classic dour Dylan commentary on the condition he was in. As
usual with Dylan though, it was so much more than that.
The coal mine metaphor is more far-reaching than it first appears to be,
leading us to an image that can capture and contain some of the magic of
these many talented tunesmiths. Basically, they all work inside coal mines,
but in the coal mines of their own personalities and identities, real or imagined, into which they must first descend to scrape away at the dim walls of
their own emotional mine shafts. The raw material they chip away out of
the deep darkness, a coal blacker than belief, eventually becomes refined,
baked under extreme pressure until it somehow is transformed into that other
substance that originates as humble carbon but which we all treasure so
greatly: the glittering diamond of a great song.
Amazingly, all of the singer-songwriters we so treasure, and certainly all of
the great ones being studied here, share one simple thing in common, regardless of the huge differences in their manners and methods. They all must
lower themselves into that coal minetheir own emotional histories, their
own personal little swatches of gritty territoryin order to chisel off portions
of the damp cave itself. They are the grimy artistic canaries we use to signal
safety or danger for ourselves in our emotional lives.
These chunks are then meticulously dragged up into the daylight, and their
ascent to the light, where the rest of us stand waiting to discover meaning, is
fraught with an intensity of concentration that can only be likened to the vast
amounts of pressure required to let that unique alchemy occur. Carbon atoms
in their original form assume a raw form that all of us know well, the dusty
lumps of coal that formerly served us all as fuel.
But then something truly magical occurs, something that can only be attributed to the attentive suffering of the singer-songwriters themselves. Both coal
and diamonds, and even the humble everyday graphite pencil itself, are
merely carbon atoms, yet they are atoms of a different order, brought into
being by the phenomenal pressures exerted though the feelings and insights
of the writer, as if crushing them into a compactor made up of the humanity
of the artist in question.
In the case of the writing and singing of great songs, to become a diamond,
an unsightly piece of coal undergoes this pressure almost willingly, or at least
the writer in question willingly submits him- or herself to the twilight dangers of this mine shaft experience. Under this intense pressure, and especially
heat, the carbon atom bonds have no alternative but to shrink into the tighter
bonds of the covalent structures we call diamonds.
At this stage, the diamond still resembles any other rock, yet after the
cutting and polishing process, the process that gifted artists such as
Dylan or Lennon so dreaded as a form of indentured servitude, the shining
facets of a song that will last forever begin to emerge. So when we gaze into
the dark mirror that each singer-songwriter holds aloft, we are at first
puzzled, since we can clearly see that the substance itself is mere carbon, a
lump of emotional coal, which is why we recognize ourselves in its reflection.
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Prologue
But at the same time, we are astonished by the sudden brilliance and unexpected illumination that occurs and makes the finished product so precious
and priceless.
After all is said and done, there is a price to pay, but the writers pay it on
our behalf: we get the diamond and they undergo a drastic convulsion of
their emotional mine shafts. Sometimes the shaft caves in, as in the cases of
Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, John Lennon of The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, Jim Morrison or, in slow motion, Pete Townshend. Only
the very fortunate can crawl back up through the dark dust out into the daylight again. Some only send their songs up above, remaining below in some
sort of odd safety in Spector-land, while we await the wells wealth.
In many cases, these grandly talented individuals serve us the same way
experimental animals served science in years past: bright birds sent down
into the depths to see if survival is possible, sacrificed if necessary, so we
can all carry on living with some semblance of civility, far above in the
daylight we prefer to inhabitthat expensive daylight we so proudly call
civilization.
Another image presents itself, similar in scale and scope and also dealing
with exploring resources and creating energythat of the oil well. On the
surface of the landscape, our cultural landscape that is, each of the musical
oil rigs that is a unique singer-songwriter appears quite distinct and different,
naturally enough. But far below, deep in the underground chambers we cant
even visualize or imagine, let alone share in, the oil, that black liquid gold, is
absolutely identical across all oil rigs. This is because the oil itself is the same
as the carbon, coal, and diamond substance, an emotional fuel shared by all
people with feelings, which is to say shared by everyone everywhere.
It is only the rigs, the heavy artistic, literary, and musical equipment
required to dredge up the liquid essence, which are so drastically different
from each other. Once we have the oil they give us, once we have the diamonds they procure on our behalf, we can witness the magical sameness of
those resources. We know that this is our oil, these are our diamonds, even
though we needed to depend on the well, rigs, and pressure units in order
to appreciate our own wealth.
Luckily for us, especially for me, in order to appreciate the craft of the singersongwriters, it isnt necessary to climb down there and watch them at work in
the damp darkness. After all, its hard enough to descend into our own shafts
and wells. It is more than sufficient to spread out the diamonds on a lovely
piece of black velvet cloth and gaze at them. Our way of doing this is to fully
listen to, with full attention and vulnerability, what their songs are telling us.
Then we can speculate about what life down in the shaft must be like, and only
then can we really appreciate just what it is they do for and to us, up here.
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For my purposes, I am content to scan the horizon and try to create an accurate map of the shafts, an alert assessment of the coal and diamonds, and a
summary of why some simply end up having way, way more carats than
others. Its all in the pressure exerted, and in the clever cutting of their facets.
A brief word on the subtitle. I do not use the word pathology in any official sense, since I am not a psychiatrist, only an art/literary/music critic, so I
use the word in the way it is easily understood by the average person: as the
study of any process in the development of diseaseand dis-ease is one of
the hallmarks of all of these artists. However, as a critic of popular culture,
one does develop a certain psychological proficiency in identifying overarching traits, and that is the map we can use to explore the songwriters personal
territories. Indeed, we could even call it spiritual geography, on a bold day.
We should also remember the words in one of Dylans most famous songs,
You dont need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Perhaps you dont need a doctor to know which way the heart flows either. Lets
just try listening to the music together.
In a way, my job reminds me of the lead character in one of my favorite
films. In The Swimmer, directed by Frank Perry in 1968 (also a magic year in
this book) and adapted from a short story by John Cheever, we follow the
movements of Ned Merrill, a man who one day decides to travel back home
to Connecticut using the novel method of swimming home via each of his
neighbors lavish swimming pools.
By diving into and jumping out of each of the swimming pools represented
by these great singer-songwriters corpus, I manage to traverse an immensely
huge landscape in a way that provides a haunting kind of coherence and continuityeven if the end result, just like in the film, is a discovery of a shared
melancholy of alarming proportions. Each pool is as different as it can be
from every other pool, each has different debris blowing across its surface, a
different mixture of bacteria and chlorine, a different ladder, and a different
diving board. Oh indeed, those diving boards are so different that each one
tells us a special secret about that particular singer-songwriter.
But the water itself, the cool and deceptively blue-green ripples and waves,
that is the same as the oil, coal, and diamonds hidden far below. The water in
the pools themselves, which can of course be painted any color and assume
any shape according to the design of the household, is our own emotional life.
The pools are merely various containers created to hold our cultural properties together, to keep the water from overflowing everywhere, to make it, in
short, into a swimming pool.
Next to the swimming pools of each singer-songwriter, which they fill with
their own resources but which still manage to reflect all of us in their shimmering surfaces, stands the house that each artist has constructed for him-
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or herself. Their houses are often built from blood, sweat, and tears and are
buildings constructed from the very breath of their own songs.
A brief note on the structure of the book. The fact that the parts are denoted
as Islands and Continents with everyone else apparently being part of a
community of singer-songwriters does not in any way suggest that the individuals considered in the island part are somehow more important than those
considered in the continent part or indeed those many talents who form the
rest of a very large cultural community. By now it is probably clear that no
one could ever be more important than Lennon and McCartney.
The designation is more attuned to the status of some as strictly solo performers, even though they often have an abundance of musical talent backing
them up in a band. Hence Dylan, the ultimate solo artist, and Brian Wilson,
the genius of The Beach Boys, are both islands, as are David Bowie, Tom
Waits, and Elvis Costello. Their character is their content.
Likewise for Joni Mitchell or Marianne Faithfull, artists whose personalities
inform their content to such a degree that they are the message bearers, no
matter who might be playing with and for them. And naturally, Michael Jackson is an island unto himself, if only because he doesnt appear to even
occupy the same planet or dimension as the rest. I chose not to include such
obviously talented islands as Madonna and Michael Jackson, since they are
clearly more dancers than writers.
The notion of continents, large bodies of talent formed out of collaboration
with a muse/partner, is therefore not a value judgment so much as an
acknowledgement that some singer-songwriters work their magic in tandem
with another. Usually their binary bond, an ultimate kind of polarization of
talents united for a common purpose, is also slightly fractious. Not surprising, since such dynamic duos may as well be considered fractals, those rare
designs of nature where each portion contains a reflection of the whole.
Therefore, we have clusters of pairs who traditionally write together and
can barely sustain themselves creatively when apart. Among these, Lennon
and McCartney are undoubtedly the supreme masters of a unique kind of
modern rhapsody, artists whose brilliance cannot even be approximated by
others on their own, with the possible exception of Dylan, who is after all a
law unto himself.
To be a continent in this regard is to have formed a structural unit with a
creative partner which is so strong that each half is impossible to consider
without the other. So, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and
Roger Daltrey, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin are among this uniquely harrowing domain.
Of course, the cartography of the larger community of singer-songwriters is
equally paradoxical, since individual artists are grouped together into
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stylistic communities, tribes, or those sharing the same emotional and creative temperatures, whether intentionally or unconsciously. The fact that they
are merged into temperamental villages of sorts does not diminish their individualism at all, because such beings are often possessed of such gargantuan
selves that nothing can ever threaten their dominion. Nothing that is, except
for the solipsism to which all singer-songwriters are so perilously prey.
The conceptual grids that contain these remarkable villages, such as the
shadowy doomed poetry of Kurt Cobain, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison and
others, are merely fences surrounding their inherent wilderness natures.
The women who walk on thin ice, such as Courtney Love, P. J. Harvey, Sinead
OConnor, or Yoko Ono, are all significant voices affirming the feminine right
to equal self-absorption and charming torture.
The radical notion that music can be used for comedic purposes, which
usually conceals a harrowing insight beneath the grin, is aptly represented
by Eminem, Steely Dan, Harry Nilsson, and Randy Newman.
The idea that a black inheritance of long-standing traditions has been
passed on to a somewhat rowdy wild bunch is equally heard through James
Brown, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, and Lenny Kravitz, all of whom went down to
the crossroads described so long ago by early blues pioneer Robert Johnson
and made a bargain with each of their own personal devils. But not all of
them, either, can be in this particular book.
To be exclusively unique and somewhat strange, which is after all the purview of all singer-songwriters everywhere, is magnified and projected to even
grander proportions by those whose very distinctiveness seems to be their
message. Among them are Ray Davies, Phil Ochs, Tim Buckley, and Bjork, figures who simply, and not subtly, imply that they are indeed not like everybody else.
By far the most immediately applicable asset to the status of a successful
singer-songwriter is the notion of writing ones way out of sorrow, if not
towards happiness then at least further from suffering, as a result of the
alchemy of emotions which such poets always employ. To live life with nothing but a heartache, but still survive, or almost, is the key ingredient of Neil
Youngs, Townes Van Zandts, Johnny Cashs, or Carole Kings work. Transcending through wallowing, we could accurately call it.
And since the stature of all these artists is such that they have been very
successful at what they do for many decades and each has a staggeringly
impressive body of work behind, if not in front of, him or her, the only way
to consider their importance is to choose a song, a couple of songs, or one
album, with which to study the reflections that each offers us in his or her
own dark mirror.
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The artists are therefore each studied through certain signifying moments
in their careers, or through the impact of a single masterpiece that sums them
up most succinctly. Their music, their records, their performances, and their
commentary thus become emblems for an enigma: how can they manage to
speak so directly to our own feelings? Each record therefore takes on the
impressionistic impact of a great painting, one that contains acres of insight
in a single stroke. Each song is a sculpture of their individual souls.
The result of the impact and power of a single song is often amazing, especially in the case of artists who have personalized the art form so extensively
that their own lives and the songs they sing are almost indistinguishable.
That, of course, is also the danger they court: becoming so self-absorbed,
self-possessed, and self-obsessed that every feeling they share is part of their
own impenetrable pathology, accessible only through the vehicles of each
individual song in their creative canon.
One lover of instrumental music recently opined, Does music really need
to come with stories attached? Well, not exactly. Even in instrumental music
there is often an element of the programmatic which conveys a narrative
structure of sorts, however loosely, for the sounds themselves. The short
answer to the question is probably yes . . . yes, music does become more influential when stories are attached to it. At least emotionally.
That was, after all, the entire charm of the early troubadour movement in
the first place, and also why the tradition split off into two distinct directions
that are still with us today. The tradition of song that developed in Romantic
times, exemplified in works by composers such as Schumann, Schubert, and
Wolff, is different from that of the troubadours in many respects. Most importantly, these song composers were not poet-musicians, because they set to
music the words of other writers.
The same can be said of the most popular American songwriters of the first
half of the twentieth century, who tended to work in teams (the Gershwin
Brothers, Rogers and Hart, and various writers with composers such as Kern,
Arlen, and Ellington).
Critic and singer-songwriter Paul Zollo identifies one unique standout:
An exception here is Cole Porter, who wrote both the words and music of
his songs, and who therefore stands above the other songwriters in this
regard, though he tended to write genre songs for the musical theatre, not
direct expressions of personal experience. Despite their often high level of
art or craft, songwriters and composers who set the words of others to
music cannot create the kind of unified presentation of personal experience
that the poet-musicians can.4
One possible exception to this otherwise accurate observation may be that

of Elton John, who manages to achieve a true unity through his musical interpretations of early collaborator Bernie Taupin. But one way or the other, what
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makes a great singer-songwriter is usually his or her public telling of personal

experiences and their effectsfor good or ill.
It is well worth quoting Saint-Andre on this subject:
It is not until later in the twentieth century that we see again the resurgence
of the poet-musician (singer-songwriter), in the form of folk-pop writers in
America and Britain starting in the early 1960s and continuing today. The
fountainhead of this genre is Bob Dylan, whose recording The Freewheelin
Bob Dylan paved the way for all who followed. Throughout the 1960s, Dylan
competed creatively with the individual songwriters of The Beatles, who
raised the status of modern popular music from tunes for dancing to songs
for listening. While Dylan and The Beatles concentrated mainly on the
ancient lyric topics of love and politics, together they defined the genre
and the almost messianic role of the modern singer-songwriter.5
It is precisely that messianic role that most interests us here. Though that
role changes somewhat over time, its essential core nature, that of I have a
secret to tell you . . ., remains unaltered over time and still requires the song
form to deliver the message. The song remains kingso much so that songs
can be mined and cultivated to reveal the true face of an era, or the real spirit
of any given zeitgeist.
Gerald Marzorati has even mused that songs might be able to unearth what
the French call the mentalite of an age: a given societys prevailing world view
and sensibility, as well as many of its interior thoughts and feelings. As he
expressed it in his review of Nick Hornbys Songbook,
A hundred, two hundred years from now, a historian of our mentalite might
well want to investigate the role played by recordings of popular music.
How did those four-minute songs, listened to while driving or walking, at
gatherings, or in the privacy of a bedroom, by youths especially (or those
wishing to feel youthful); heard over and over again and then abandoned,
but never forgotten, for new songs . . . these songs, the tens of thousands of
them: how did they bind people together culturally, and how did they
resound in the deepest reaches of the self?6
That how and perhaps its connected why are the two linchpins of this
book.
One music critic, writing in The Globe and Mail newspaper review section,
has even surmised that the digital revolution has rendered the quaint old
notion of a CD album obsolete. Songs rule now, Robert Everett-Green tells
us, not albums, and this notion is changing the very nature of pop music.
But of course, it is the very nature of pop music that it must change
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repeatedly, and quickly, in order to capture the flow of feelings that spill out
of any given era. Or else it wouldnt be pop.
Youve only got to spend a short time online to realize that songs, not
albums, are the principal medium of exchange. Even without considering
how theyre disseminated, songs over the past decade have become much
more related to other songs than to albums. This promotes the idea of a song
as a porous, dynamic entity in a maelstrom of other songs.7
One critical wag at the New York Times even went so far as to parody that
famous Stones line about only being rock and roll but loving it for his essay
on contemporary songwriting being considered a literary art form. In Its
Only Rhyming Quatrains, But I Like It, John Leland referred to a raft of
new anthologies making the latest case for the literary afterlife of rock and roll
lyrics and asked if such famous verses do succeed as poetry. And more
importantly perhaps, is that really how their legacy should be judged?
Back in 2001, Paul McCartney, one of the greatest exponents of the pop
song of all time, invoked his own poetic license with the publication of a book
of his lyrics from 19651989, all presented as poems. McCartney preceded a
legion of fellow popsters who have let loose their lyrics on an unsuspecting
poetry audience. Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Leonard
Cohen, Suzanne Vega, Robert Hunter, Richard Hell, Henry Rollins, Tupac
Shakur, and last (and least) Jewel have all followed suit.
This either means that a grand pretension is underway to validate the
material of pop stardom, or . . . that songwriting is the modern form that
poetry takes in order to secretly slip into our modern souls. For that reason
perhaps, Everett-Green opined that Kids dont give a rats ass about CDs
anymore . . . songs are no longer the contents to be poured into a predetermined container, because in the new music environment, songs rule!8
At the core of the affection we have for the song, whatever its shape or
form, is the simple fact that it does something that few, if any, other art forms
can do. The simplicity of the function is what struck Nick Hornby so powerfully about the nearly spiritual access that songs can provide for us, what
we all long for in a songthat certain something in us all that we want and
need poets to articulate on our behalf.
Julie Wilson, at 82 one of the great interpretive singers with over 60 years in
the business of delivering songs, recently summed up what makes a great
song great in the most succinct terms imaginable: truth, she reported, it comes
from the heart.
In The Music Is Sweet, The Words Are True, Dinitia Smith pointed out
the very important differences between poetry and song lyrics, even the most
poetic song lyrics. In fact, she even declared that there may be very few similarities, a notion supported by one of the great writers for the musical theatre,
Stephen Sondheim.
Prologue
xxi
Classical lyricists tell a story with wit, elegance and clarity while working
within tight compositional rules and narrative restraints. Achieving that
sublime poetic effect requires a mix of skill and art, tight discipline and free
floating creativity.9
Sondheim describes it as technically a very difficult craft, because youre

hemmed in by the music, and his notion of a great lyric is to make it not
sound like there is a writer there . . . unlike written poetry, you cant go back
over lyrics, they exist only temporarily.10
Oh but what a marvelous temporary life they have, and perhaps the way
we give them a more permanent life is to allow certain favorite songs to take
up residence within us, whether in our actual memories or our remembered
fantasies.
Each individual singer-songwriter under consideration, whether a solo
performer, a collaborative partner, or a member of the stylistic community
of musical artists, is still most definitely a singularity. Each is idiosyncratic
in the extreme, and perhaps that is the whole point, in the end. None of them
had what one would call normal childhoods with idyllic home and family
lives. But perhaps thats also only because no one does.
Many of them dont know how to have a home, on or off the range, though
there is something inside them that makes them hopelessly try to create families, usually a big mistake for all concerned. Something there is that doesnt
love a wall, the poet Robert Frost remarked in his poem Mending Wall.
True Bob, but something there is that wants and needs one.
Frost also once remarked that home is the place where, when you have to
go there, they have to let you in.11 How heartwarming. But home is the very
place most of these writers have fled from, way, way off the beaten track, as if
fleeing the horror that our roots sometimes inspire. And yet the artists always
somehow manage to write home. They write home to all of us, no matter
where we live.
A house may not be a home, especially not for the restless spirits being celebrated in this book. But their houses, built of songs made from joy and sorrow in equal parts, are well worth swimming home towards. Home is
where the art is, I suppose.
In most cases, the enigma of a particular singer-songwriter unravels easily,

whether or not his or her content is fully understood at first. The artists most
striking words and sounds are used as immediate entrances towards
and through the darkness of his or her own specific mirror. Every mirror
reflects a story.
Here is the architecture to which we want to dance.
PART ONE
ISLANDS
INTRODUCTION:
THE SINGER-SONGWRITER AS SOLO ARTIST
The seventeenth-century metaphysical poet John Donne once declared, in one
of his famous meditations on emergent occasions, that no man is an island.
In 1624 that certainly sounded true. But what did he know about pop music?
He believed, quite rightly of course, that none are entire unto themselves, and
that every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. True, but some
individuals, and many who are clearly gifted in their fields, do appear more
landlocked than the rest of us. They are indeed isolated by their greatness,
surrounded by a sea of our perspectives, yet only approachable through the
most stealthy of insights. Insights that are often hidden in plain view in their
workthose remarkable songs.
Some artists, the ones we can characterize as islands, do indeed mine a
territory so personal that they might seem disconnected from the human
family, even though everything they pen shows us so clearly that they are intimately tied to the emotional roots of that same family. They also, for reasons
that differ according to their own biographies, have an insistence on telling that
and only that particular truth which eventually becomes the hallmark of all
their work.
The great anthropologist of feelings, Ernest Becker, whose cheery little
tome The Denial of Death changed many young minds in the early 70s, was
also notorious for his own espousal of something he called an anti-idealist
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position on the matter of communications. It was almost as if he shared a

sensibility with many solo singer-songwriters as well as an appetite for using
communications to strip bare the illusions that usually move us to communicate at all. Many of the artists in this first part devoted to islands seem to share
a belief that the purpose of singing is to engage in self-revelation of the
highest order.
As Becker stated way back in 1974, just after the greatest romantic social
experiment in counterculture history had all but fizzled out,
Each age has its own peculiar imperative. In our time this imperative seems
to be that of the complete unmasking of human pretensionspretensions to
the discovery of ultimate truth, to be rational animals, even to having some
special significance in the universe. The social self, the cultural symbol
systems woven of mountains of wordsall this we now see is a disguise
over mans basic animality, his creatureliness.
In this real sense, each persons world view is a private religion that
permits his life to be saved from bogging down into futility; and since this
fit seems so appropriate to his survival, he sees it as a holy writ which he
must spread to others in order equally to save them, to make their lives as
congruent with reality as his own. The symbolic gospel that we try to spread
abroad is our own forced rationalization of a situation we do not too well
understand. A final intriguing question is left at the end of a statement such
as minewhich after all is a communication: with whom exactly does it
communicate, and for what personal reasons?1
The stripping bare of all falsehood is definitely one of the primary urges of the
solo singer-songwriters being examined in this Islands part of the book, where
an appetite for truth is elevated far above the need for consolation or concealment. The self-consciousness of American popular musicians is certainly one
of the major identifiers for their craft. In Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in
Popular Music, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor have taken the examination of
the social self of the singer-songwriter to new heights. Their examination reveals
much about what makes certain islands so strong and so unforgivingly real.
Ben Yagoda analyzed that urge quite well in his discussion of their book
and what he called the story of self-consciousness, of the ways significant
performers chose, in the course of a song, to comment on themselves.2
Johnny Cashs Man in Black or John Lennons Ballad of John and Yoko
are two of the best examples of this phenomenon, but of course it applies
equally well to Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Tom
Waits, and Elvis Costello, to name only a few. James Taylor, choosing to not
only comment on himself alone, goes so far as to comment on the very same
song he is singing, as in, Hey, Mister, Im the one thats singing this sad song.
Part One: Islands
Many of the individualistic artists who must perform their own compositions, and who have practically put the former singer-songwriter for hire
tradition out of business since the 60s, have been what Yagoda in his piece
calls stoked by powerful notions in the cultural air and inordinately interested in proving how real they are. That description seems to summarize the
impulses of all the islands being explored here.
But Yagoda also astutely pointed out another stream of influence upon
many of our best singer-songwriters, whether they work alone, in a partnership, in a group, or as part of a stylistic community. He referenced Lionel Trillings seminal 1972 book, Sincerity and Authenticity as a means of tracing the
lineage of such tortured romantics as Neil Young and Kurt Cobain, not to
mention John Lennon or Leonard Cohen, back to certain eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century denigrations of beauty in favor of the energy and power
of the sublime. Such artists tell the truth as they see it, whether we want to
hear it or not, preferring not to whitewash their insights with any illusions
that help us cope with the information in the song. Nakedness of emotion,
they seem to suggest, is all that matters.
Artists of the stature of singer-songwriters who sum up their age and era do
certainly tend towards the hermetic. As Trilling expressed so well, The artist
ceases to be the craftsman or performer, dependent upon the approval of an
audience. His reference is to himself only, or to some transcendent power
whichor whohas decreed his enterprise and alone is worthy to judge it.3
This tendency is exactly why so many of our greatest songwriters, having
irrevocably altered the landscape of the entertainment industry by insisting
on singing their own songs in so many unconventional voices, then plunge
so far into their own quirks, complexes, fears, neuroses, compulsions, and
pathologies in order to deliver their anti-idealist messages. It is also why so
many of them veer so close to the edge of barely surviving their own great
gifts, and why often their own craziness becomes the principal subject of their
beautiful works of words and music.
Ken Ludlow questioned that romantic adherence to a belief in the power of
lunacy in his article Crazy Aint Creative:
Its true that some of our most gifted writers have been crazy as a bag of
hammers. But they have been brilliant despite their disturbances, not because
of them. Its a persistent myth that psychological torment and creativity are
inextricably linked. According to the myth, we run the risk of drying up creatively when we attempt to heal ourselves emotionally through careful selfexamination or psychotherapy. The thinking is, if you exorcize your
emotional demons, your creative angels will leave too. Our disturbances
dont help us keep our edge. Instead, they prevent free passage into the
deeper, more spontaneous elements of the creative unconscious.4
These disturbances cause most singer-songwriters to choose the route of

relentless self-examination over that of some sort of therapeutic remedy.
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In other words, they use the songs themselves as their own private form of
therapy session, which we, ironically enough, just happen to listen in on
while in the comfort of our own living rooms.
Free spirits are always alluring and are more delightful to us the more
passionate, lunatic, hedonistic and noble about their own situation they
become on the scale of self-indulgence. Lord Byron, one of the first and finest
of these momentary flashes known as universal artists (the ones who say
something furtive and fast to the world in passing), and the one who is so
powerfully evoked by all true rock stars, put it this way a long time ago:
A true voluptuary will never abandon his mind to the grossness of reality.
Reality can never obstruct the true visionary, of course, because the true
visionary is less interested in the real world than in his reaction to and interpretation of it. And that is as it should be. That degree of fixation and focus
gives birth to a particularly fruitful state of mind, the one in which the best
songs come unbidden to the pen.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihali calls this state the condition of
creative flow, an optimal experience where one is given over utterly to delivering a specific action, and one which enhances the end products enormously.
And the conditions for this state of flow are uniquely pragmatic:
We have seen how people describe the common characteristics of optimal
experience: concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over
to think about anything irrelevant, or to worry about problems. Selfconsciousness disappears and the sense of time becomes distorted. An activity
that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it
for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it
is difficult or dangerous.5
Considering how difficult it might be for a masterful solo artist to achieve

the state of flow required, say, to produce something like Gates of Eden,
one can only imagine the dizzying heights of interactive quantum relationship required to yield something along the lines of Eleanor Rigby. What if
the condition described above was available to some people, not in the sanctity of solitude, but only in the company of a certain partner with an undeniable need to collaborate? Its a frightening question.
A titan like Dylan, for instance, comes onto the scene precalibrated to
another wavelength and able to attune himself to that flow state by generating
a frenzy of free verse, simultaneous with the music to carry it forward. Now
that is a dazzling abilityto collaborate with oneself.
But it has a downside: you quickly outgrow peoples expectations and
leave your audience bewildered by your rapid and accelerated evolution
towards something utterly unknown to them. They dont know that it is
equally unknown to you, but that that is precisely what makes you so transcendent: the fact that you accept transformation without knowing the consequences in advance.
Part One: Islands
John Rockwell, the music critic of the New York Times, once remarked that in
choosing to broaden his artistic palette into rock n roll, he [Dylan] was making
more genuine folk music than the earnest strummers of acoustic guitars.6
This is a seminal kind of insight which one needs to apply to creative
singer-songwriters in general as an artistic breed. That is the way to fully
appreciate how and what they do in and to our popular culture.
Rockwell characterizes the nature of our cultures ritual consumption of
content in a very perspicacious manner:
Elitist pop culture critics must, in the end, be mindful of what large numbers
of people actually see and read and listen to. Because the underlying mythology of pop culture is still the idea that the approval of large numbers of
people validates that culture and the society that produces it. If something is
truly loved by millions of people, it has touched those people, has tapped into
some stream of universality that indicates a life force attenuated in more
elitist art.7
There are two ways of looking at the fact that magnificent albums such as
Rubber Soul or Revolver, by The Beatles, or Pet Sounds and Surfs Up by The
Beach Boys, might register the same or similar brainwave patterns, no
matter where in the world those brain patterns live. As Rockwell so astutely
pointed out, pessimists might see such a phenomenon as proof of pop
cultures mind control, whereas optimists might interpret it as evidence of
artistic universality. And artistic universality is the only way to explain the
empathy of singer-songwriters who function as dark mirrors while practicing the deepest kind of subjectivity imaginable. They cross the borderline
between the personal and the collective, between the individual and the
universal. They may operate as islands, but beneath their brittle surfaces,
the same bedrock of human feeling exists, and that is what they tap into
with their creative upheavals.
That strange and somewhat magical symbiosis of music and words forms
the platform for what the poet Baudelaire once called the drastic expansion of individuality. Indeed, the ordering of sound, including both the
vocal sound and the instrumental sound, is a near universal method for
fixing our awareness wherever it is required or desired. Music, which is
organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it,
and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when
random information interferes with goals. Listening to music wards off
boredom and anxiety, and when serious[ly] attended to, it can induce flow
experiences.8
Never have I heard a more understated explanation for why Joni Mitchell
cures the blues, our blues: because she staves off the disorder of overloaded
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ideas and gives an actual shape to experience, the shape of the time it takes to
listen to her songs. A surrogate sufferer, she becomes the designated mourner,
so its little or no wonder that that way beckons depression.
On the other hand, if craziness produces something as perfect as My Back
Pages by Bob Dylan, then perhaps we should just leave it alone. Perhaps the
truth is in the listening and the hearing, the knowing and the understanding,
that such writers bring to bear on our otherwise cluttered minds. Also, I personally would never recommend that something like Zoloft be given to someone
like Brian Wilson, if by doing so it meant that he wouldnt have been able to
create the song God Only Knows! Is that being selfish of me? I dont think so.
Another affliction that seems to plague the solo singer-songwriters so mercilessly is the obsessive search for authenticity in their art, a voice both poetically and vocally which is absolutely authentic to them, and therefore can be
perceived by the audience as the real thing. This romantic holdover from the
nineteenth century would be quaint in our age, were it not for the surfing of
suffering which it so intensely induced in our best poets and singers. Naturally, if the fear of inauthenticity so paralyzes the solo artist, one can only
imagine what it does to those trapped in a successfully symbiotic partnership,
since they never know if their partners might be the key, or if its them, an
even worse case of inauthentic phobia.
In their recent and highly informative study, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor accomplished something
that one critic celebrated as diabolically provocative. Greg Quills review of
it focused on the impossible dreams of the enthusiastic amateur performers
who appear on so-called reality idol programs, and how, due to their entry onto
the pop arena, they will never be able to live up to the kind of scrutiny that
genuinely attentive and caring music fans have applied to their artistic heroes:
They will never be the real deal. Then again, authenticity may be just as illusory as wannabe dreams. And given the abundance of heavily manufactured
pop froth thats cluttering up radio these days, credibility may not matter much
at all in the future.9
Barker and Taylor pointed out that
rock n roll was, at its core, self-consciously inauthentic music. It spoke of
self-invention; if Elvis could reinvent himself, so could others; if he could
assume a mask, so could anyone. Its inauthenticity gave it staying power.
Its hard to say how realness originated as a defining principle in the
acceptance of music. I couldnt say if the issue of authenticity was first
raised by music fans or by the music industry itself.10
One way or the other, its arrival in our midst was an unexpected side effect
of the reality television program known as The Sixties. Barker and Taylor also
wrote:
Part One: Islands
Authenticity was always important to folk musicians, who value their proximity to source material. But it crossed over into popular music in the 1960s,
when the authenticity of politicians became an important cultural issue, and
when the culture in general became obsessed with what was phony and
what was real. Authenticity is both elusive and illusory. Its a quest, not
something that can be achieved.11
Its an intriguing question, why these artists struggle to define themselves

so authentically, and also why it seems they are simply never really satisfied
that they might in fact already be authentic. The book on its quest posed an
equally interesting answer: Why is authenticity important to fans of punk
rock and country music and unimportant to fans of disco or show tunes?
Why was authenticity important to Neil Young and unimportant to Elvis?
The answer lies in a philosophical question: should the aesthetic sense be
allied to the moral sense?12
Perhaps the experimental filmmaker Jean Luc Godard was right when he
suggested that it may be true that one has to choose between ethics and
aesthetics, but whichever one chooses, one will always find the other at the
end of the road.
In most cases, the enigmas of particular singer-songwriters unravel easily,
whether or not their content is fully understood at first. All of their own most
striking words and sounds are used as immediate entrances towards and
through the darkness of their own specific mirrors. Every mirror reflects a story.
I mentioned earlier that it was not my intent to psychoanalyze these

talented artists or their gifted work, something made all the more feasible
since they have all already more than amply psychoanalyzed themselves
through their many challenging and occasionally soothing songs. But it bears
further emphasizing that this is the case by focusing on the highly personal
nature of my insights, with an equally clear understanding that there are a
myriad of other interpretations for this often mysterious creative material.
In a very real sense, my firsthand accounts of a listeners reaction to the
continuum between these artists both allows me and helps me to keep my
judgments from being overly speculative. I am merely writing about my
own fused responses to their music and also about the subtle fact that, in
the end, our culture is merely a mirror of ourselves. Whoever you may choose
as your own preferred dark mirrors will be equally valid, since they do for
you what all our dark mirrors do for all of us: articulate feelings we need to
have expressed on our behalf.
What I am doing, of course, is psychoanalyzing not the writers and singers
themselves but rather their emotional impact on my understanding of my own
perspectives as a person, of our understanding of all of our shared perspectives
as a culture, and that obscure point at which the two intersect.
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This is one of the key advantages and main differences between an objective approach, which is impossible, and a purely subjective approach, which
is after all the method that each of these particular artists themselves employ
with such dexterity in the first place. The irony of avoiding an overly speculative psychoanalysis, while still drilling deeply into the shared meaning of the
songs effects on us all, is explored and appreciated fully by not just admitting
or acknowledging the personal nature of the perspective, but also by celebrating it as such.
Thus it is naturally a highly subjective take, though one formed by the
information available to an art and music critic, one who is synchronizing
the outer and inner feelings provoked by songs and singers that serve as
our significant signposts for personal growth.
Remember, it is a totally different intersection point for each listener and each
performer. Therefore, one might produce a completely different selection of
dark mirrors, for instance one that included many of the worthwhile
performers it was necessary for me to exclude here. For example, the remarkable songs of The Band could clearly have been included in the evolution of
the new concealed confessional format created by Dylan. But they will have
to be included in someone elses book, someone for whom they performed
the same elliptical function bestowed upon me by my own personal mirrors.
If anything, I am more obviously psychoanalyzing my own personal reactions to their work on a firsthand basis via the intent listening I did from
1962 onwards. Back then, and without realizing it, my own obsessive listening habits eventually turned out to be research for the artistic phenomenon
in question.
During the fertile period covered in this text, illuminating the rise to ascendancy of the individual singer-songwriters and the communications revolution
they augured, all of them contributed, willingly or unwittingly, to a specific
analysis of their/our own feelings and a more general analysis of the character
of the contemporary culture in which they/we lived and worked.
That is precisely what makes the singer-songwriters discussed in this book
dark mirrors, since it is often surprising that the most important things we
need to realize, about ourselves and about each other, are often not conveyed
in the most positive or consoling content, but rather more frequently in those
insights which disturb, distress, disorient, and otherwise generally shake us
and wake us up.
Imagine these songs then as a kind of personal jukebox, with these particular songwriters loaded onto it, and then imagine focusing their overall sentiments severely on this particular sequence of songs. By doing so, the shared
emotional temperature and temperament of these songwriters can become
even more clear, as does their emblematic nature for so many of us. It could
even be considered the soundtrack to the book. In fact, I burned several CD
copies of this books soundtrack to give to friends and colleagues as a Christmas gift last year.
Part One: Islands
In the case of this particular CDs sequence, the theme appears to be that of
seeking some sort of vague security or solid ground in a constantly shifting
and changing world, a world of love and loss, exile and return. The CD opens
with Bob Dylans Queen Jane Approximately, in which the author offers a
strange variety of sanctuary.
Dylan refers to a time, taken strangely for granted, when you (Queen Jane)
have been abandoned and dismissed by your family, and then offers himself as
a refugea refuge lacking all qualities except for its opposition to everything
else in the song. Now naturally such a world-weary person is also going to be
the ideal listener to Dylans unique brand of redemption. Furthermore, the
ultimate offer (or maybe a requirement of sacrifice) is then proposed, when
the narrator asks if you will come see him when you want somebody that
you dont have to speak to.
That same weary soul is being lamented, or eulogized, in Brian Wilsons
song Surfs Up, in which the Beach Boy who was swallowed up by the
ocean inside of him uncannily crooned about a choke of grief, hard hardened I, who lies beyond the point of tears.
In another startling example, Elton John wonders about the future of that
same weary pilgrim, when he asks, Where to now St. Peter, if its true Im
in your hands. In fact, the question in this song is not only where the pilgrim
should be heading, but also where he is.
All dark mirrors ask questions more beautiful than the answers. All dark
mirrors are messengers, and to paraphrase the best of them, Dylan, they are
messengers with minds that multiply the smallest matter. Like many other
listeners who were deeply affected by their messages, I have used these songs
to both help understand myself and to clarify the shared confusions of
midtwentieth-century life.
It is also equally true that we used them together, to understand, in a more
abstract and neutral way, the times in which we all lived. It is therefore
perfectly acceptable that this particular lineup of poets has been curated, in a
manner of speaking, in order to create a coherent building in which our
memories and emotions can reside, if only for the duration of a song.
1
The Story Teller:
Bob Dylan
To Be on Your Own
When he and I went to Nashville in 1966 to work on Blonde on Blonde, it was the
rst time Id ever seen a songwriter writing songs on a typewriter. Wed go into
the studio and hed be nishing up the lyrics to some of the songs we were going
to do. I could hear this typewriterclick, click, click, ringreally fast; there was so
much to be said.1
Robbie Robertson
In one of his most incisive recent songs, Things Have Changed, from 1999,
the dynamic but still mysterious Mr. Dylan sings about an enduringly crazy
universe and of a lasting confusion about ones place in this world. Oddly
enough, he seems to be saying the same essential thing that he said more than
40 years earlier in The Times They Are a Changing, but with one key difference. The hopes that fueled his insights then have all but abandoned him now
(though his great poetic gift of disturbing insight remains). These changing
times, however, leave him no alternative but to declare, later on in the same
song, All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.
The undisputed spokesman poet of his generation, whether he likes it or
not, his elliptical verse and prose are still being interpreted and reinterpreted
for the many layers of meaning they provide. After all, thats what one does
with poetry. And his work is a high yield crop. Dylans perpetual use of a
12
Dark Mirror
mask and a constantly changing persona in order to deliver his pronouncements make him a perfect subject for exploring the amazing complexities of
the pathology of the singer-songwriter.
He has personally experimented with a dramatic range of extreme states of
mind designed to connect him to his muse, and his sheer survival amongst us
is clear proof of the English poet William Blakes dictum that sometimes
the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Dylans fame rests not only with the profound way he communicated his
thoughts and feelings to his audiences but also with the huge influence he
had on all the other singer-songwriters of his era, changing how we defined
the whole art form. Robbie Robertson, founder of The Band and an early
Dylan collaborator, said it best when he offered a creative homage to an old
mentor by saying that Dylan had broken down the gates and opened up the
sky to all of the possibilities of what a song could be.
When Bob Dylan declared at the beginning of his incendiary electric set at
the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, I aint gonna work on Maggies Farm no
more, he was doing far more than merely announcing that his own tastes
had changed. He was in fact declaring that the very art of songwriting itself
had changed irrevocably in his hands.
As he launched into the volatile hurricane of amplified sound that propels
that angry song forward, he was single-handedly altering the landscape of
the singer-songwriting tradition, and using a song itself as the means of
declaiming his intentions. Just in case anyone may have missed the point,
he was also using the power of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him,
and especially guitarist Mike Bloomfield, as the machinery with which to
deliver the electrified message.
The crowd went crazy, some of them for the right reasons, some of them for
exactly the wrong reasons. Either way, very few people, fans or otherwise,
were adequately prepared for the future when it arrived on that soft and
folksy day. As usual, Dylan was way ahead of the curve. In fact, he was
pointing to a curve so far ahead that no one even knew it was there at all.
But that didnt matter to Dylan, and it still doesnt. Its his job, after all. Hes
an artist, he doesnt look back. The man, now 66 years old, won last years
Grammy for Contemporary Folk Record, with Bruce Springsteen inexplicably
taking the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Record for his nostalgic reworking of Pete Seeger s iconic songs. Furthermore, Dylans winning album,
Modern Times, while essentially a classic take on his own blues and folk roots,
is still a fast moving train hurtling towards an unknown destination that
perhaps exists only in his own mind. Thats where all the best destinations
are anyway.
Ironically, it was Seeger who reacted most violently back in 65 to the future
that Dylan represented, with legend telling us that he was so distressed by the
The Story Teller: Bob Dylan
13
daring new electrical format of his younger peers set that he lost control of
himself and attempted to cut the power cords to the amplifiers.
Literally true or not, the metaphor is so exquisite that we want to believe in
its veracity. The past struggling to hold back the future, at all costs. That performance character, played by Bob Dylan portraying himself, is perhaps the greatest contemporary exponent of the ancient craft of singing stories. It has given us
both the primary template for the perfect mastery of this craft, as well as the
principal complaint lodged in opposition to what happens to Dylans own
(and all) songs once they are written: the commercial recording process.
The brilliantly gifted Robert Zimmerman, who created an ideal persona for
himself as Bob Dylan in order to deliver his existential mail to all of us, was
the kind of poet through whom verse speaks like a kind of medium in a trance
state, while paradoxically he managed to fix those fleeting visions into the
portable format of records with only the greatest difficulty and anguish.
In his excellent study of one of our greatest living cultural phenomena,
Writing Dylan, Larry David Smith unearthed the perfect quote with which
we can begin to appreciate Dylan as a model for both the heights and the
depths to which a great songwriter is often prey. Dylan hated the side of the
business that required him to flash freeze his visions onto vinyl, in those early
days, and he was perpetually struggling against the industry that was essential to delivering his messages but anathema to his self-perceived role as a
creative artist. This mass communications process is one of the most ironic
we know.
Recording a song really bores me. Dylan declared. Its like working in a
coal mine. I never got into it on that level.2 Unlike, for example, several of
the other writers we will encounter who lived to produce the perfect rendering
of their songs on record, and toiled tirelessly until it was just as perfect as they
imagined it to be. Brian Wilson and David Bowie are ideal examples of the
artist who fully embraces the acoustic technology necessary to send his or her
thoughts into the households of millions of listeners. Dylan is the kind who
feels like a slave when he is forced to manipulate sounds until they do the right
job on his own behalf.
As Ive already intimated, it is not accurate to call Dylan the voice of his
generation, if only because he hates the term so much. And yet, he is some
kind of emblem for us all, the question is just a matter of what this emblem
means and how it functions. My proposal is that he means exactly what he
says, and that the best way to determine meaning is to listen only to what
he says and nothing else, especially not the media hype surrounding his long
and winding career.
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Dark Mirror
Bob Dylan is notorious for despising the media, and for good reason, since
no one ever grilled Robert Frost or Dylan Thomas (from whom Robert
Zimmerman borrowed a surname) to ask them what they meant by what they
said. They were poets, and poets, like oracles, sometime speak in riddles. But
since Dylan was a new breed, especially with his historic switch to electric
instruments, reportedly after witnessing what The Beatles were able to do
with theirs, the media has dogged him for 45 years in search of meanings.
Maybe it was the way he looked, hyper-cool with his hooded speeddrenched eyes and his method-actor kind of attempts to explain himself, all
of which only made matters worse for the listeners trying to come to terms
with his mutable messages. He must know something, they thought.
Even if he was the voice of our generation, that would in itself reveal
something more about our time than about his songs, since his voice is so far
from anything anyone had ever heard before being used as a communications
tool. It is the voice of our age, howling its discontent, yet it is also a deeply
human voice, expressing Dylans own dramas of fear and longing, cherished
hopes, and the occasional redemptions.
So, the best tack to begin appreciating his poetic place amongst us is to
admit that everything critics say about him is usually wrong, probably
including everything I am about to say as well. But as much as possible,
Id like to let him speak for himself, since that is what he does so well,
whether or not we always clearly understand him.
Singers had of course existed for millennia, but not one with this harrowing
degree of extreme vulnerability and haughty rage mixed in equal parts into a
cocktail so supremely cool it made even the hippest rock stars seem
conservative. Dylans single most important contribution, apart from the
poetry in the songs themselves, was his own calculated collision of two historically opposed or parallel tracks: a carefully controlled conflict between
telling a noble national story, as epic poetry does, versus telling a highly
personal story, as lyric poetry does.
Poetry is as poetry does. Its long shadow is cast towards us from the distant
shadows of antiquity and engulfs even the modern songs that are its offspring, tying them together with a common thread of humanity and emotion.
Poems, and the songs into which they evolved over time, were originally
used as a means of recording oral history, and it is oral history, especially in
the hands of a gifted poet such as Dylan, which still succeeds in conveying
something uniquely unavailable to any other art form.
Dylan has created three undisputed masterpieces and has painted them
with his profound words: Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and the exquisite Blonde on Blonde (1966). If he had done nothing
else, such glorious excursions past the limits of the heart would be enough.
But of course, he has done so much more. John Wesley Harding (1968) and
15
The Basement Tapes (recorded in 1967 but not released until 1975), the great
records that followed the trilogy, are the rosetta stones which help us to decipher his perennially perplexing hieroglyphics. They themselves, by themselves, can be used as the best possible mirror in which to witness his magic
at work.
Essentially, Dylan grabs and mixes together the formal structures of the
love song, the elegy and the ode, formerly separate entities, and he produces
a colossal milkshake made from equal parts of both the epic and the lyric.
He renders them indistinguishable. By doing so, he magnifies feelings until
the borderline between what he says and feels and what we listen to and feel
is blurred and dissolves into thin air.
The Great books have been written. The Great sayings have all been
said. . . .Im about to sketch you a picture of what goes on around here
sometimes, he claimed in liner notes from 1965. He said he was going to
do a sketch for us. . .he never suggested youd be able to understand what
the sketch means.
Poets and writers tell us how we feel by telling us how they feel. They find
ways to express the inexpressible. Sometimes they tell us the truth and sometimes they lie, to keep our hearts from breaking, so spoke the unnamed
publisher at Scribers for the preface to Bob Dylans Tarantula, his highly
experimental stream of consciousness novel that had to wait five years,
delayed by his motorcycle accident, until 1971, for its public release. It came
and went without much fanfare, not surprising given its hermetic and convoluted structure, even more amorphous and shapeless than the songs and texts
for which he had already become famous.
That editorial insight by his bewildered publisher is well worth the price of
admission to its dark and drug-addled depths. Finding ways to express the
inexpressible, sometimes telling us the truth and sometimes a lie, to protect
us from our own vulnerabilitysuch is the perfect job description for all
singer-songwriters, but it is rendered especially poignant in the face of
Dylans great gifts.
Dylan uses these considerable gifts to tell us stories, narratives that we may
or may not recognize as our own, depending on how closely we pay attention
and how openly we approach the darkness of his message. All singersongwriters are, to some extent, also story tellers, and therefore this book tells
stories about the story tellers. But few of them spin their tales with either the
poetic aplomb or downright daring of the former Robert Zimmerman.
The arc of his incredibly long and creative career is stunning and inspiring
both because of the accomplished audacity of his talent and for the sheer endurance of his longevity. The basic elements of the myth are straightforward
enough: a kid from Nowhere, Minnesota, travels to New York after absorbing
the key touchstones of the American folk idioms; he meets the dying Woody
Guthrie in an encounter almost guaranteed to elevate his status to that of the
interloping inheritor; he is discovered by producer John Hammond and
embarks on the vast output for Columbia Records which is now legendary.
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Dark Mirror
In the notes for Bringing It All Back Home (1965), the first in his trilogy of
masterpieces, he declares, A poem is a naked person. . .some people say that
I am a poet.
Indeed, he is and always has been a naked poet, even neurotically so.
The kind that alarms the neat and tidy assumptions of the academy, again
and again. The historical poet most easily associated with Dylan, apart from
the obvious names such as Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, or Corso, is T.S. Eliot, the
declaimer of the hollow men.
Interiority, the ability to engage in a dialogue with oneself, which is incidentally overheard by the outside world, is the essence of Dylans entire
agenda. Dont ask him what he means by what he says, since by saying it he
is actually trying to figure out what it means himself. And the gesture of
broadcasting ones musings, via the art form of singing and songwriting,
comes perilously close to the edge of the entertainment chasmone runs
the risk of being mistaken for an entertainer rather than a clanging alarm
clock, which is what Dylan actually was, and still is.
Jonathan Wallace, writing in the Ethical Spectacle, identified one of the best
categories for the understanding of this dilemma when he called such
artist/performers accidental angels, individuals who start out working
within an existing framework of the entertainment industry but end up
producing great art along the way, almost as if by accident.
Bob Dylan is exactly this kind of accidental angel, perhaps the best example
we have. Indeed, all his fellow singer-songwriters being explored and appreciated in this book have a shared and similar desire to escape from the
confinement of the very industry that makes their work possible in the first
place. Each one eventually discovered the limitations of his or her own admiring public, as soon as he or she decided to try something new, something that
admiring public wasnt quite prepared for.
In Dylans case, however, it started almost immediately, when he was still
in the formative stages of his career, due somehow to the alarming fact that
he did indeed appear to be born fully formed, and even more important, fully
informed about his own agenda and where he wanted to take it. Since he was
in possession of great gifts that other artists would kill to have, he automatically began to chafe against the commercial confines of his own popularity,
and he used his craft to plunge deeper and deeper into the dark mirror we
have come to recognize and rightly laud as his own unique specialty.
He did it through his mastery, of course, but also through the basic structure of what makes singer-songwriters so captivating and so essential to us:
the deft combination of sounds with language as a means to control and
contour emotions, the essential arsenal of the troubadour. Pierre SaintAndre is an academic who has extensively studied the troubadour tradition
and has isolated its powers remarkably well.
17
The marriage of words and music in song consistently presents thought and
feeling as an integrated whole, something that other art forms can accomplish only fleetingly. Further, the performance of a song adds the element
of sheer physical presence that we find also in live theatre and in spoken
poetryin these arts, the performers body and person are made to function
as an artistic medium. Thus when the poet-musician performs his songs, he
brings his own thoughts and feelings to aesthetic life through the medium of
his own personmind, body and soul combined in an organically unified
presentation of the creators individual experience. It is this supreme integration of aesthetic elements, mirroring the integration of essential aspects
of the individual person, that makes song so intensely personal an art form.3
Anyone who has ever seen Dylan perform, or indeed even seen film footage of his performances, knows how electrifying his presence can be as a
delivery system for his content, with or without electric instruments. Live
performance is clearly one of the keys to his longevity, since even at 66 years
of age he is on stage an average of one out of three nights every week of the
year. Since the passing of James Brown, Dylan may be in line for the crown
of hardest working performer in show business. Its a job.
My songs are written with the kettledrum in mind. A touch of any
anxious colour. I have given up any attempt at perfection. I accept chaos.
Im not sure whether it accepts me.4 This he once declared about the business he so excelled atbringing it all back home.
Back a few years, just before his remarkable resurrection (or was it a
renaissance?), when Dylan was interviewed by UNCUT Magazine prior to
his 2001 Love and Theft album, someone came up with one of the most novel
questions Ive ever heard anyone have the nerve to ask him: How easy has
it been, being Bob Dylan?
At first, it seemed a facile inquiry, but then it elicited a telling response.
Dylan stated that there have been a lot of tricky parts, where he had to
assume another character in order to survive. He had to surrender his ambitions at a certain point, he continued, in order to get where he needed to be.
A surprising answer, and the questioner pressed a little further, asking what
kind of ambitions he had ever had to surrender. Dylans answer: Thats what
youre going to have to find out.5
But that was always his answer, in whatever exotic character he assumed in
order to both survive and thrive. One of his most clarified and distilled
remarks followed on the heels of that observation. He casually announced
that he didnt choose to do what it is we see him doing. It chose him. And that
if he had anything to do with it, he would be doing something else. It is part
and parcel of what Dylan means to us that he doesnt even describe or define
what it is he does. . .he merely alludes to what you see me doing, just as he
has for almost the past half century.
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Dark Mirror
One of Dylans own principal inspirations, the modernist poet T.S. Eliot,
once remarked that great art can communicate long before it is understood.
He may as well have been referring to Dylan. Another precursor, the equally
modern painter-writer Wyndham Lewis, also opined in a manner perfectly
aligned to what Dylan has become for all of us. He claimed that the great artist
is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future, because he or
she is the only person fully aware of the nature of the present.
Dylans magnificent contributions to that history are equally saturated with
rage and romance, as he demonstrates that the nature of the present never
really changes, it just morphs into constantly shifting alternate futures. The
nature of his present, however, was drastically changing back in the stunningly transitional years of 19641965. The public was confused by his new
persona, and the more unaware they were of the artifice of his old persona,
the more mystified they were by the new one, just another artifice.
Which is why he howlingly sang out those changes loud and clear, lest
folksy listeners be further lulled by his former work: I aint gonna work on
Maggies farm no more.
When he returned for a second set at that notorious Newport Festival,
where Pete Seeger lost his folksy marbles, and Dylan tried a more softspoken approach, singing exactly the same message but in the voice of his
earlier and more acoustic style, the message was even more clear. With his
gentle but sorrowful rendition of Its All Over Now Baby Blue, he was
declaiming that he was through singing folk songs the way everyone expected
them to be sung.
In a fluid world, with no clear past and a future thats even more vague,
Dylan simply says, Strike another match, go start anew. Because, as the title
suggests, the old, at least, is done. Or maybe only changing.
His very next album, Highway 61 Revisited, contains the history of the future
in no uncertain terms.
When a 15-year-old Bruce Springsteen, himself a future inheritor of Dylans
mantle, first heard its astonishingly brilliant signature song, Like A Rolling
Stone, he aptly described its sound as creating the feeling that somebody
had kicked open the door to your mind.
Phil Sutcliffe, writing in Mojo Magazine, described its surprising new
direction as rough and tough, like the Stones last three singles. . .and
then some.6
That and then some tells us a great deal, for Dylan had suddenly pushed himself away from the dining table where his legions of fans were awaiting the next
item on the menu, but he didnt deliver a dish from that same menu. He delivered a recipe for a future which hadnt even been imagined yet, not even by
some of the most equally visionary of his peers, indeed not even by his most
brilliant competitors, The Beatles, who were still caught up in the construction
of their own utopian dream. They, like the rest of us influenced by their grandeur, were too busy being happily in love with love to notice that something
was terribly wrong with the subculture they had helped to manufacture.
19
Dylan not only noticed the early flaws in the 60s fantasy, ironically, almost
as clearly as Frank Zappa did, but he also used the flaws to flesh out his own
dark vision of what the real future would bring us. Which is, of course,
precisely where it did bring us, and precisely where we are today, mired in
melancholy. To date, there have apparently been some 170 cover versions of
the songs on Highway 61 Revisited, many of them by bands in this century,
not the last one.
Its incendiary messages just keep resonating in larger and larger circles,
largely because of that tricky little notion of Eliots, that great art communicates before it is fully understood. Thus Dylan is one of those special creatures
who has a place in both our past and our future, since he is always running
ahead of us like a manic scout on a doomed wagon train traveling off the edge
of the world.
Sutcliffe summed it up perfectly when he described the inherent anger
inside Dylan that was finally being allowed out to playthe sour effect of a
smile that bends the lips but never makes it to the eyes.
Dylan, in good spirits, inspired musicians who had never played together as a
unit to find new peaks individually; when that happened simultaneously, he
had a track. Some feat of self-restitution for a man who had been having, or
giving himself, a terrible time. Fame, booze, drugs, women of course. And
musical differences within himself. But youthfully fleet, he could outrun any
pain, or out think it. 7
Outthinking pain. Now there is one of the finest definitions for what this
gifted man does so well. He outthinks and outruns his own pain, and as a
result, he performs the staggering sleight of hand necessary for all of us to feel
that he is also doing the same for our own personal and collective pains. With
Highway 61 Revisited and the breathtaking followup recorded in Nashville
during an even more chaotic bender of brilliance, Blonde on Blonde, Dylan
completed a trilogy of masterpieces which has never been equaled, other than
by himself that is, much later in his long and weird career.
None of the exemplary studio musicians he assembled in 1966 in Nashville
was really that familiar with the Dylan phenomenon quite yet. Johnny Cash
was an exception in country circles, of course, having recorded It Aint Me
Babe two years earlier, but Cash was always an exception to every rule,
which is why he had a long and fruitful friendship with his younger peer.
He was also equally blasted himself.
But as Sutcliffe described it so well,
Perhaps Nashville could be forgiven its ignorance. By the end of 1965, the gulf
between Bob Dylan and the world outside Bob Dylan was vast and widening
by the day. In the mainstream media he appeared as a scornful, jive-talking
insect. And even to relatively hip observers he seemed stranded in a remote
world of his own devising, isolated by his success, by his enigmatic public
20
Dark Mirror
image and by dalliances with narcotics. Recently cast aside by the folk music
establishment that had championed him, and by portions of his fan base,
Dylan was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.8
His solution? Rock on, harder than ever. Push forward, further than ever.
Not the healthiest approach perhaps, but definitely one designed to elicit
the maximum amount of goods from his gift before it burned out. But the
strange fact is that he, and it, never did burn out. Sure, he made many twists
and turns, into and out of better or worse records released in the white heat of
his own alarming awareness, but in the core of where it matters, he was
always in it for the long haul. And he still is.
Larry David Smiths fine study of Dylan refers to the masterful insight that
Robert Zimmerman continued to write for the character of Bob Dylan to
perform, and in it he poetically refers to his output as the songs of a lonesome traveler. Accurate enough; however, I prefer to think of what Dylan
has demonstrated, especially by his longevity, his recent resurrections with
Love and Theft (1997), Time Out of Mind (2001), and the 2007 Grammywinning Modern Times, as the loneliness of the long-distance runner.
That phrase comes from the groundbreaking collection of stories by the
British writer Alan Sillitoe in the early 60s. He wrote of a defiant young rebel
called Smith who inhabited a no-mans land of institutionalized postwar
angst. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frostbitten earth, he wonders why, for whom, and for what he is running.9
Dylan has been wondering the same thing himself for about 50 years.
What makes him unique is that while wondering what and why, he continues to sing about it, turning his damp wonderment into the dark mirror the
rest of us can gaze into while he slowly plods along his long-distance run,
past us, over the hill, and off into the distance. And then, by the time we catch
up to where he has gone, he has once again gone on further ahead, ever the
aimless scout pointing the way to a nonexistent destination. . .an invisible
frontier the mere thought of which is enough to satisfy us.
His are the peculiar, dark, or confusing moments which most people, and
even most singer-songwriters, tend to avoid. The moments when an ancient
truth becomes self-evident: that the sign of every great and profound truth
is that its opposite is also equally true. Dylans vast and murky body of
work is a veritable catalogue of such contradiction, and if he contradicts
himself, thats just fine (to paraphrase Whitman) because he does contain
multitudes.
Indeed, Dylan is a kind of Walt Whitman on wine and Herman Melville on
dope, all rolled into one impossible package, a multifaceted jewel of
Americana, especially in the case of Melvilles intricate and lesser-known
works such as The Confidence Man. In that 1857 novel, long considered his
21
strangest and least accessible, the author concocted a comic allegory aimed at
the optimism and materialism of midnineteenth-century America.
In it, a mysterious shape-shifting confidence man approaches the passengers on a river steamboat and, winning over his not-quite innocent victims
with his charms, urges them to implicitly trust in the cosmos, in nature, and
even in human natureall with predictable results. It was not until the
mid-twentieth century that critics rediscovered the book and praised its wit,
stunningly modern technique, and its wry view that life itself may just be a
cosmic con game.
This persona has Dylan written all over it. Inspiring confidence through his
casting of doubt, Dylan obviously tossed the net of his own tragic-comic
allegory over the hyper-optimism and materialism of the 1960s, and indeed,
over every decade since then. He is the exemplar of a certain literary device
designed to utilize irony to its full creative effectthe untrustworthy
narrator. The wearer of many masks. The artist without a discernible face
beneath any of the masks, but whose selection of which mask, and when, tells
us more than any real face ever could.
Dylan can contradict himself in a brilliant manner, not only contradicting
our established assumptions from album to album, but also sometimes from
song to song and even, in some extreme cases, from one line to another within
the same song. He looms large. The shadow he has cast is large indeed
larger, longer, darker, more obscure, and yet more authentic even in its artifice
than any Whitman or Melville before him.
Perhaps Ginsberg or Kerouac, a couple of his major precursors, have cast a
similar cultural shadow, but his is still more significant, if only because his
absorbed theirs and moved on much deeper into a dangerous country: the
American mainstream of popular music and its attendant machinery.
Examples of his exotic roaming from crumbling truths to tarnished dreams
are legion, as are his moments of sheer crystallized poetic power at its most
uncensored, unmediated, and elusively taunting.
His last portion of the masterpiece trilogy, Blonde on Blonde (1966), contains
two of the grandest love songs in our history, Sad-Eyed Lady of the
Lowlands and Visions of Johanna, perhaps my own favorite Dylan song,
and one that also contains my favorite line: The ghost of electricity howls
in the bones of her face. Even without knowing what that means, I do know
for certain that Ive seen it myself.
Moreover, what makes them great love songs is the fact that they both
contain their own opposite, contradicting themselves at every turn. No, not
hate, but something worse: doubt, fear, dread, and doom. Thats what makes
them still work so many years later, the inherent tension of knowing that
what you sing about is mostly impossible. That plus the fact that the meanings of these songs are as difficult to determine as are their own unsavory
emotional truths, embedded like diamonds in mud.
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Dark Mirror
Ever since first plunging into the manic publicity surrounding his arrival in
New York and his first 1962 recordings, the artistic social and personal pace
that Dylan developed was so white hot, so hyperactive, that something was
bound to happen to slow it down, if not stop it all together. He once remarked
to Robert Shelton, his earliest and best biographer, that it took a lot of
medicine to keep up that pace. When Shelton inquired as to whether the
burnt-out poet was happy, he received a characteristic reply: I dont need
to be happy. Happiness is kind of a cheap word.10
But if, as he so often declared, Dylan had abandoned understanding
himself, where does that leave the rest of us, so intent on trying to grasp his
meaning? His meaning is simply that it cant be grasped, and hes told us so
on multiple occasions over the years. When will we finally start believing
him? Sutcliffe has suggested that only Dylan knows, and hes not saying,
but Im not so sure about that. Why should he know the secret of himself
any more clearly than either we know him, or we know ourselves?
Hiding in plain sight has always been his best method of creative and
personal survival. Long before he reached a private and public breaking point
as a result of too much of everything, he was already employing an essential
defense mechanism to protect his obviously fragile inner world from the
encroachments that have wounded so many other singer-songwriters.
He has described the pressures as unbelievable, and we believe him, since
he didnt have a group per se, with whom to share the tensions, the way
bands of mates such as The Beatles did, at least in their early days. He was
alone in the blinding lights that he himself had attracted.
Sutcliffe chronicled:
His sometime leading lady, Joan Baez, had seen signs of disintegration as
early as 1964, on a UK tour during which she reckoned he was spoiled to
death in an environment populated by sycophants who praised each new
line that he peeled off his typewriter. Far too astute not to notice what was
going on around him, Dylan developed coping mechanisms. He held us
all at a distance, Baez described, except for rare moments, which we all
sought.11
All we know for sure is that throughout 1967, the so-called summer of love,
Dylan was invisible, hiding out in Woodstock, New York, in an extended
hibernation or accident-recovery period, and playing secretly with the
members of The Band, producing what would eventually be abundantly
bootlegged and revealed as some of his most profound work to date,
The Basement Tapes. But The Basement Tapes, as astonishing as they were, and
they still are, were a mere prelude to what I still consider to be his greatest
record, unless that is, he releases another one next week.
John Wesley Harding (1968), contains in its hard dusty shell the key kernel
of Dylan himself, perhaps allowed to leak out inadvertently during a
personal and professional period of recuperation, rejuvenation, and soul
23
searching, conducted in broad daylight by the maker of all the masks

Robert Zimmerman.
But all of his epistles, even from the very beginning and long before his
actual crackups, were always about describing some form of disintegration,
at first from a distance, then later from the center of a dangerous private
hurricane. Disintegration and the desperate attempt to make things whole
again have always been his primary subject mattersdisintegration held
together with the glue of a brilliant but deranged poets emotional fire.
Even so, one has to agree with Sutcliffes astute assessment:
Dylans genius is that it doesnt matter. Dylan gave the impression of an
artist moving almost too fast to breathe. If youre smart, you gotta just keep
going. He was chary of being described as an iconoclast, or even a rule
breaker. Its not a question of breaking the rules, dont you understand?
I dont break the rules, because I dont see any rules to break. As far as Im
concerned, there arent any rules.12
The former Mekon member Jon Langford summed up that precarious

breaking point, and the artistic rebirth of 1968s John Wesley Harding as The
Great Escape, and indeed it was, from the Houdini of songwriters himself.
Hes in some foreign country at the end of his rope, and all the joy, wit and
swagger has been sucked out of his sorry, skinny arse by purists, hacks
and dolts. Its time to leave the circus. Back in Woodstock, he maybe has a
bike crash, but certainly sheds at least a couple of layers of Bob-skin.
He doesnt want to be the spokesman for a generation, he wants to
change diapers, dodge bullets, curl up under the radar and sleep late. Hes
mucking around in the basement with his Canadian mates and somehow,
simultaneously perhaps, putting together a crop of songs that hell ship off
to Nashville and turn into a low-key (sort of) comeback album called John
Wesley Harding.
Because we dont get to hear The Basement Tapes until years later, this is our
first sighting of a fully grown up Bob. Plunging deep into the songs and
mythology of what Greil Marcus calls the old weird America, Dylan claws back
some purpose and pleasure in playing music, while quietly trampling the
beloved protest singer and back-combed electric Judas to death on the way.13
But he is also doing just exactly what he has always done, only quieter: he
moves to the edge and declares it to be the center, then he makes the musical
world reorganize itself around him. Talk about your weird old America.
Dylan did the same thing again just last year (43 albums later!) with Modern
Times, a masterful sleight of musical hand which won him a 2007 Grammy
Award for contemporary folk music. Not bad for the 66-year-old ghost of that
insanely exuberant shape-shifter.
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Dark Mirror
All the shapes he has assumed over the years have been burdened by the
perpetual identifying of him as a prophet of this or that, something he clearly
abhors. After all, if a man didnt want to be the voice of his generation, why
on earth would he want to be its prophet? Of course, Columbia Records has
a slightly different take on his remarkable status as its premier artist, since
like most industries, the record companies spell the word profit somewhat
differently. Real prophets are often confusing.
A gorgeous love song such as Sad-Eyed Lady, for instance, from Blonde
on Blonde, allows us to follow a heartfelt but obscure trajectory. After
addressing the sad-eyed lady of the title, Dylan asks, My warehouse eyes,
my Arabian drums, should I leave them by your gate. This and the whole
rest of the song mean something that the left side of our brains may never
be able to process, while the right side quietly sighs in agreement, yes, of
course!
Meanwhile, in Visions of Johanna, from the same album, he asks a question that anyone who ever loved anyone can comprehend: Aint it just like
the night to play tricks when youre trying to be so quiet?
Back then, Dylan transformed pop songwriting with the shocks and
disjunctions of modernismideas he found in both the avant-garde and in
old, weird folk songs. But lately he has made himself an emissary from a reinvented yesteryear, where he finds clues to eternal truths in both the blues and
the Bible. I practice a faith thats been long abandoned, he sighs. Aint no
altars on this long and lonesome road.14
The only difference, apart from that astounding voice, aging like fine
Armagnac, is the former obsession with speed and immortality and the latter
and current obsession with slowness and mortality.
The poet Rilke once defined all art as the result of having been in some
danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where
one can go no further. The poet Bob Dylan is the living incarnation of this
notion. He knows what it feels like to be on his own, to have no direction
home. He knows what it feels like, so ironically given his vast fame, still to
be a complete unknown.
He also knows how it feels to cease living only for himself, whether he likes
it or not, and by doing so to transform his personality into a distinctly
revealing mirror, one capable of containing every contradictory notion we
might imagine about him.
Bob Dylan remains an enigma, and all of his songs are emblems of that
enigma. Since there are as many interpretations of his songs as there are
listeners for them, he also remains a reflecting surface par excellence. The perfect dark mirror.
One of his personal and creative intimates, Robbie Robertson, perhaps
summed it up best: When he writes songs, hes telling me things about
himself, holding up a mirrorand Im seeing it all clearly, like Ive never seen
it before.15
25
Strangely enough, he does exactly the same thing for all of us. Even if his
mirror does occasionally run the risk of breaking into a thousand pieces, it
still reflects exactly the same two thingsthat which is really there and that
which really should be. He often reminds me of a figure spoken of by
another great American poet, Wallace Stevens, who referred to the watcher
in the snow, the one who sees nothing that is not there, and the nothing
that is.16
2
The Dream Teller:
Brian Wilson
I Just Wasn't Made for These Times
Brian fought hard against the industry attitude that if it works, run it into the
ground. Music meant much more to him than that. He was trying to do something
so much bigger with his teenage symphonies to God. In the process, he really
rocked the boat and changed the world.1
Lindsey Buckingham
George Martin, The Beatles brilliant producer, remarked in 1996 that if there
were one person that he had to select as a living genius in pop music, he would
choose Brian Wilson. But Wilson, responding with characteristic embarrassment that same year, said that he wasnt a genius, just a hard-working
guy. Yet strangely enough, both of these apparently contradictory statements
are true.
Could there ever be a more day-and-night scenario, a starker human
contrast than that between the messages and voices of Bob Dylan and Brian
Wilson? And what voices! One coming up out of the lower darkness and the
other descending down to us from above, in the tone of an angel in big trouble.
One of the few singer-songwriters to ever potentially challenge the sonic
supremacy of The Beatles, with his group The Beach Boys Wilson singlehandedly did what John Lennon required the help of Paul McCartney and
producer George Martin (himself a living genius) to accomplishthe creation
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of technically revolutionary soundscapes that served to fuel the dreams of an

entire generation of flower children. Wilson also buckled under the weight of
his success, retired from performing, and descended into a maelstrom of
drug-induced isolation, from which he has only recently emergedto the
global acclaim of multitudeswith the long awaited release of his experimental masterpiece, Smile, some 37 years after it was first composed for, but
rejected by, The Beach Boys (as too weird and challenging).
Unlike Dylan, but for the same self-survival instincts, Brian Wilson sought
out sweetness and light in his lyrics and music, and he largely found them.
Whereas Dylan and many others utilized their own personal flaws in the
transmission of their genius, essentially telling us that the world had gone
wrong for the following reasons, Wilson chose to prescribe a loving and
spiritual attitude through an inherent appetite for happiness and joy.
He didnt run from heartachefar from it; he used his remarkably angelic
voice to suggest to us that we all share the same needs, desires, and fears,
and that by recognizing that fact we might be able to transcend our differences
and work out solutions to what has gone wrong with the world. He descended
into the same deeply depressive well of himself and his own limits as Dylan
did, maybe even deeper, but he used his music as a salve and bandage to try
to heal the wounds. And his wounds were very, very deep.
Like Dylan, he began exposing those wounds to the world in the magic
year of 1962, a year equally important for The Beatles and several others
under consideration, as if by some strange synchronicity at play in popular
culture itself. Whereas Dylan was an allegorical story teller, Brian Wilson
was a straightforward teller of dreams, a fragile soul who approached the
need to find a way out of despair from quite the opposite direction.
Though they both had personal experience with those secret insights from
the frenzy of fast and vast fame, and they both discovered the truth of the
old adage that celebrity is a mask that eats into the face, as did all the
subjects of this book in fact, they each took a drastically different approach
to seeking survival under the bright lights. Whereas Dylan simply applied
one new mask after another, in the form of fresh persona voices, Wilsons
valiant attempt was to live without a protective mask at all, a choice that
scalded him severely and left him a mere shadow of his former self.
That self was a genuinely gentle youthful spirit whose falsetto dreams of
happiness echoed a generational urgehe used his own insecurities and
fears as the raw material for some of the most emotionally direct and romantically dizzying songs of our age. But then soon, just like The Beatles, he
began to outgrow the brand he had created with his brothers and cousin,
and The Beach Boys began to undergo the kind of dark warping that stunts
creative growth in favor of placating the marketplace. He personally started
to explore a new musical terrain that his own group was neither musically
equipped to handle nor temperamentally interested in traveling towards.
If Dylan is our T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound rolled into one sneeringly hip
container, then Brian Wilson is the Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost of popular
The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson
29
musicdeceptively simple, colloquial in phrasing, with a spare and evocative lyrical style embedded in the culture that created it. He celebrates his
country and its potential at the same time that he celebrates the desire of
every youth to be free, happy, and hopefully, in love. Never has love been
evoked with a sonic texture so genuinely ecstatic as in Wilson.
Like his idol John Lennon, Brian Wilson was a drastically insecure and
morbidly sensitive soul who suffered a nervous breakdown as a consequence
of the pressures of his astronomical success and all the sheer creative power
that goes along with it. That, coupled with an emotional and identity meltdown resulting from his conspicuous consumption of LSD, was followed by
a disastrous period of therapeutic reconstruction. Again, his experiences
mirrored those of Lennon. Great minds not only think alike, they melt alike.
Both phenomenally gifted empaths, capable of reading our minds, they
simply could not deduce how to best care for their own minds.
In 1964, not surprisingly the year The Beatles invaded America, Wilson
crumpled and withdrew from his hectic touring schedule with The Beach
Boys, concentrating instead on studio composition and production. In 1965,
just like Dylan, The Beatles, and so many of the forward-thinking singersongwriters under consideration, Wilson encountered the notorious
brain vitamin; thereafter his name would be forever associated with a
historic acid burnout. In 1966, Wilson recorded Pet Sounds, probably the most
exquisite pop record ever released, and certainly one of the most influential.
In 1967, he attempted to create his masterpiece, Smile, in the looming
shadow of Sergeant Pepper, but he threw in the towel, musically and mentally,
after a mutiny on board the good ship Beach Boy. But his musical influence
was so sublimely subterranean and so technically extensive, carrying on the
mastery of his other idol, the felonious Phil Spector, that he inspired the work
of countless other writers, producers, and musicians in a way that far
outweighed the sordid sadness of his unfortunate creative collapse some
40 years ago.
But he came back. In fact, his was the ultimate comeback.
There has always been something downright Shakespearean about the rise
and fall and rise of Brian Wilson. The playwright wrote in Henry VIII:
I have touchd the highest point of all my greatness and from that full
meridian of my glory, I haste now to my setting: I shall fall like a bright exhalation in the evening. But poor Brian fell so far after such a meteoric rise.
The Beach Boys formed about 1961. In a way, the group itself had always
existed as a germ inside the head of Brian Wilson, who at 12 years of age
would regale his family with kitchen table sessions where each member was
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forced to repeatedly sing a verse until they added up to a jigsaw puzzle that
Brian would finally sing on top of, unconsciously mimicking the way actual
records were really made. After him, the art and craft of producing records
would be done differently.
Producing music, meaning both the making of it and the perfect technical
production of it, was in Wilsons blood almost from the beginning, before he
even knew what it might mean. Given his fetish for organizing sounds, he
was guaranteed a more appreciative understanding of what it means to
capture the songs within a musical structure and a sonic package that
approached the sublime, his perennial goal. As a result, and unlike Dylan,
he also immediately appreciated the importance of the producer in making
music possible. Wilson was a born producer of Mozartian scope and scale.
Whereas Dylan loved performing and hated recording production, Wilson
loved production and hated performing with a pathological passion. To say
he was a shy person would amount to an understatement of profound
proportions, given how entertaining his entire career, early and late, has been
for all of us, his vampires.
Both artists grew up in public before our eyes, Wilson literally from a
boyhood of celebrity that would have challenged the character of even the
boldest extrovert, let alone, him. At the risk of bending a metaphor too far,
Wilson understood clearly what so many singer-songwriter artists do not:
that a gifted producer is the master diamond cutter whose creativity
completes the process of dredging up the raw material from the emotional
coal mine, giving it full potential as a fine jewel. The great Memphis producer
Jim Dickinson often described making records as the way a songwriter
communicates with life after hes gone. But why do these geniuses all seem
like prodigies?
For some odd reason, 23 years of age seems to have been the pivotal point
at which everyone from Dylan, to Wilson, to Lennon managed to create the
songs and music that so captivated their culture.
How on earth was this possible? How can artists so young ever grasp
truths which now seem so eternal?
Even in the midst of his most accessible, youth-oriented, and fun fun fun
period, Wilson was capable of creating and conveying several early pieces
that gave us an indication of the insights of his later maturity. Some singersongwriters are performing artists, such as Dylan, Bowie, Costello, or
perhaps the greatest live band ever, Fleetwood Macthey want to see the
whites of our eyes as they deliver their messages. Others are recording artists,
such as Wilson, Lennon, or Van Morrison, all of whom prefer the emotional
distance of records, history, and legacy as a means of measuring, or outrunning, their own greatness.
Their work amounts to a screen, filled with their often hyper-personal
content and images, but paradoxically also a screen on which our own reflections are received, reflected, and projected. So either way, all of the gifted
writer/performers under study were integral to a massive overhaul of the
31
song-making tradition: they each in their own way contributed to a

revolutionary renovation of a tradition stretching back to Tin Pan Alley at
the turn of the nineteenth century and into the 20s and 30s, followed by an
equally drastic revamp of the tradition carried on by the Brill Building tradition in New York in the 50s and 60s.
Prior to the revolutionaries were interested in here, those two earlier traditions were veritable factories of great songs, but they were songs written for
others to sing. What made and makes our own contemporary masters so
compelling is not only that they included a powerfully personal, subjective
perspective to their work, their own private diaries of experience, so to speak,
but also that they alone could sing their songs, so idiosyncratic did the art
form become from the 1960s onward.
Brian Wilson was one of the great avatars of this new perspective in songwriting. His unique gift, however, apart from his unerring sense of harmonic
vocal and musical proportion, was the incredible technical virtuosity he
brought to producing the records. He was his own George Martin, after all!
Very few singer-songwriters express intense frailty or emotional vulnerability as deeply or severely as Brian Wilson did. John Lennon came close,
but he armored himself and his work in a tough sarcasm that hid the scale
of his fears. Only in the occasional song such as Nowhere Man or Help!
did he let it leak out. Wilson assumes no armor and no masks; he attempts
to reach us at a basic human level that cant be camouflaged. Everything leaks
outrather than a shortage of feelings to convey in song, Wilson felt too
much, and much too strongly. It was almost more feeling than a song can
contain and still even be a song.
Like with Dylan and Lennon, Wilsons two singer-songwriter peers who
also changed the landscape of contemporary music, Wilsons faithful audiences rebelled against his ongoing attempts to grow creatively as an artist. They
revolted against his heartfelt desire to leave behind the brand that had
endeared him to the masses in the first place. Evolution is always a dangerous
proposition in pop music.
One of the best studies of the impressive rise, shocking fall, and triumphant
return of Brian Wilson is contained in Charles Granatas Wouldnt It Be Nice,
taking its title from the joyous opening track on Wilsons masterpiece, Pet
Sounds (1966). In it, the trajectory from boy-wonder to adult composer is
traced perfectly and leads directly to the creative impasse Wilson experienced
when he tried to grow up, at the same time as competing with The Beatles and
combating his pathological family (a white version of the Jacksons if ever
there was one) all along the way.
Why, nearly forty years after its creation, are people extolling the virtues of
Pet Sounds? Why does it continue to draw the attention of younger listeners
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Dark Mirror
seeking enlightenment? What is it about the music that compels us to

devour in-depth box sets, televised tributes, live performances and numerous writings on the subject? Pet Sounds is ageless. Its songs speak to us, their
melodies striking emotional chords that resonate deeply within our souls.
More than a musical statement, Pet Sounds is Brians magnificent breakaway
from The Beach Boys. By writing from his heart, Brian reduced sadness and
elation to their barest essentials. In making his triumphs and tragedies our
own, he created a uniquely personal opus that ached with vulnerability.2
After channeling a cultural spirit with which he identified but in which he

did not participate, the surfing craze and its buoyant bopping West Coast
sounds, Wilson created a string of scintillating pop hits that echoed the tenor
of the times. Before the arrival of The Beatles, that is. With charming, if
slightly cloying, anthems like Surfin, Little Surfer Girl, Surfin USA
(the first blockbuster hit), 409, Shutdown, and Little Deuce Coupe, he
gave America its first hint of a self-contained rock band, even if it was one
in the early formative stages of greatness.
But even in the midst of some occasionally soft-centered dance songs, Brian
Wilson was slowly letting loose a series of insights that were foreshadowing
the depth of his songwriting feelings and the heights of his aspirations. The
unreleased tune Their Hearts Were Full of Spring hinted at some of the
deeper and darker substance below the dancing surfaces.
After laying the groundwork for the idyllic story suggested in the title with
talk of a boy and a girl who exchange love tokens and live in a state of perpetual happiness and youth, Wilson quickly transitions to the conclusion that
they did in fact die, that their graves were side by side. Following this,
he does, however, recapture and recolor that initial idyll with the suggestion
that violets grow on their graves because, as the title says, they carried spring
within them still. If you listen to this little-known track on the boxed set of
collected Beach Boys music, with its unaccompanied voices swirling in a
manner quite unheard of in America at that time, youll get the basic vibe that
never leaves Wilsons music, no matter how big the production values or the
backing band becomes. Its a quintessential vocal harmony that only the word
angelic can adequately describe. Pale shades of Nat King Coles Nature Boy
come to mind.
Perhaps the first indicator of danger on the horizon came very early on.
I have a well-worn vinyl copy of The Beach Boys in Concert from 1963 with
a solo vocal version of In My Room soaring above the requisite screaming
girl mania, in which Wilson was already intimating the full degree of his
historic fragility. Theres a world where I can go and tell my secrets to, in
my room, in my room.
The big bopping hits just kept on coming: Catch A Wave, Fun Fun
Fun, Do You Wanna Dance?,and I Get Around. All of them captured
the essence of what it meant to be growing up in Southern California just
as the 60s were beginning to pick up and take off, but before it all became
33
serious cultural business. None of them captured the essence of the shy
genius at the control panel. At least not until the shy genius began to
experiment with some newly popular psychedelic chemicals that were
making the rounds of his golden community. Yes, surfers were among
the first to trip out. Seriously.
Suddenly Wilsons songs altered their course; while still remaining
shiningly simple odes, they began to drift towards more introspection, less
fun fun fun perhaps, but more pleasure for sure, more joy, more ecstasy.
Please Let Me Wonder and She Knows Me Too Well were Wilsons
post-nervous-breakdown songs, created in 1965, the year he began supplementing his diet with the same kind of potent psychic drugs that had already
begun to take their toll on Lennon. The weirdly majestic California Girls
and the willfully experimental Good Vibrations were among the first direct
evidence that Wilson had changed his creative motivation from pure entertainment to pure music. As was his greatest record, Pet Sounds, steeped as it
was in clouds of hashish and vials of intensely powerful lysergic acid. But
most importantly, it was mired in the shift from adolescent angst to humanist
poetry.
Most of the other hits had been co-written with Wilsons cousin, Mike Love,
but the boy genius was quickly moving far beyond anything that his youthful
collaborator, or his family for that matter, could comprehend. From the beginning, under the tutelage of a brutally dysfunctional father similar in many
ways to Michael Jacksons patriarch, it had been a family affair: Brian played
bass, composed and arranged the songs, and his father Murray, a failed musician with grandiose ambitions, was the manager and nominal producer;
brother Carl Wilson played guitar and provided equally gorgeous vocal
harmonies; brother Dennis pretended valiantly to play the drums; college
classmate Al Jardine added a few strums and his own lovely voice to the
mix; first cousin Mike Love sang lead and co-wrote the lyrics.
In those early days, popular music meant teenage music, or at least music
for teenagers and their dreams. Indeed, The Beach Boys themselves were
largely untutored kids who were moving quickly, but who were largely in
the dark about what they were really doing or why. Both Carl, who was a
mere 14, and Dennis were still in high school, while Mike was the only seeming adult around, at the ripe old age of 20.
David Leafs liner notes to The Beach Boys boxed set traced the trajectory:
From 19621965, The Beach Boys rode Brians musical wave, scoring sixteen
top forty hits, with Dont Worry Baby being one of the greatest double
sided singles of all time and a number one smash for the group, at the height
of Beatlemania! Listening to those hits and album cuts such as Warmth of
the Sun, it is clear that Brians artistic development happened at lightning
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speed. In January 1965, determined to concentrate on his composing and

record making, Brian retired from the rigors of touring.3
Basically, while The Beach Boys were away entertaining the world with his
early hits, Brian stayed home and started cooking up something truly new,
and even more crucially, with a new songwriting collaborator, Tony Asher.
Asher was an advertising copywriter who had found a new product to extol,
that of youthful longing and despair, and it was his words that gave flight to
many of Brians own secret feelings. That, and of course, the dope.
He was the first collaborator Wilson found who could match his musical
ability with evocative lyrics, later to be followed by another, the uniquely
gifted Van Dyke Parks, and both would find that though their creative connection with Wilson was an ideal one, the band and its brand, as well as the public
in general, were not quite so welcoming to the changes they represented.
Asher has mused long and hard about why the groundbreaking Pet Sounds
was so soundly rejected by the audiences of its day, not to mention by the
group whose name was ostensibly attached to the record.
Some said the record label, notorious in the best of circumstances for its
paucity of promotional activity, had no faith in the album, and in fact, the
label did very quickly release competing Beach Boys product, suggesting
that it had given up on Pet Sounds somewhat prematurely. Others felt that
the album just wasnt what Beach Boys fans were expectingthat it failed
to reflect what they had grown to love about Brian and the boys. The fans
wanted more of the same, and Pet Sounds was anything but that. Still others
posited that the album was simply ahead of its time.4
Asher went on to note that a strange underground momentum kept building for about 30 years, until the records rerelease on CD, and later its inclusion in the boxed set, and even a special edition for fetishists like us, with
three discs of the foundation tracks and sessions for the entire enterprise.
Suddenly it had become the instant classic that it really always was. Theres
no shelf life to genius after all. Asher stated,
Perhaps of even more significance, Ive encountered dozens and dozens of
people, fans, music lovers, composers and lyricistswho have shared with
me the often profound effect the album has had on their lives. Time and
again, people have told me that for years theyve wanted to thank Brian
and me for saving their lives. Strangers who have endured difficult, often
dreadful childhood circumstances have told me that the Pet Sounds album
convinced them that there were other people out there who understood,
and who had survived.5
One thing we can all agree upon: Brian Wilson is a survivor, he is perhaps
The Survivor. Largely because he endured the tepid response to his masterpiece; endured his familys rejection of his maturing musical taste; endured
35
their open rebellion at his dedication to working with quirky lyricist Van Dyke
Parks on his followup masterpiece, Smile (which took a full 37 years to get
made the way he wanted it to be); and finally endured a creative collapse
brought on by Beatles pressure, lysergic acid, and self-doubt, all of which left
him crippled inside, bloated outside, and hiding out in his room for
decades.
The songs in Pet Sounds revolve around a simple core that makes them part
of a high concept: how to live through youthful heartache and the utter
absence of faith in what you formerly held to be true.
Its leadoff song Wouldnt It Be Nice is so gorgeous that it makes us
forget that its really about kids wanting to be old enough to spend the night
together. The more the two talk about the prospect, well, as the song says, it
only makes it worse to live without it. Still, before saying good-night, they
resolve to at least keep talking.
The song You Still Believe in Me give us perhaps the essence of what love
might be: to believe in someone even if theyre not quite perfect. I know
perfectly well Im not where I should be, the narrator offers, but instead of
moving on to discuss improvement or some other solution, he is led to reflect,
repeatedly, admiringly, on the belief that keeps the couple together.
Perhaps one of the most articulate love songs ever written about not
needing to articulate your love, Dont Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder
implores youthful love to listen. There are words we both could say, but
dont talk. The simple presence of a person, the muffled beating of a heart,
these can be enough, he says. Sometimes they need to be.
The song God Only Knows is remarkable, even more so with its mention
of a deity in pop music, for its impeccable production values and the soaring
heights to which it can take a declaration of love and the core question, What
would I be without you?
The very strange song I Know Theres an Answer was originally called
Hang On to Your Ego (the title changed at the insistence of Mike Love in
reaction against its LSD-induced quest for certainty), and it contains the
essence of Wilsons warnings about losing touch with one reality through
effortless chemistry while coming closer to another one through the determined effort of talent.
Here, the original line, Hang on to your ego, though I know youre sure to
lose the fight, is replaced by I know theres an answer, I know but I had to
find it for myself. Only on the boxed set years later did that song retrieve
its true splendor in which it was allowed to express the singers dark feelings
in unalloyed terms. Dont do what I have done, it seems to warn; dont let
your identity be melted away during your search for enlightenment. Its an
artificial paradise, he cautions, since as Jack Kerouac once remarked, enlightenment wasnt built in a day!
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But Wilsons most personal revelation, and the sentiment that would
remain his diary entry for the next 30 years, was contained in the harrowing
but gentle little dirge, I Just Wasnt Made for These Times: Sometimes
I feel very sad, sometimes I feel very sad, sometimes I feel very sad. . .I guess
I just wasnt made for these times.
Just in case you missed his point, sometimes he feels very sad. And the
isolation of trying something new weighs him down, since hes all alone in
wanting the new thing. Furthermore, whenever he can find the energy
and drive to try and make things better, he also finds himself utterly alone,
with no one else interested, with no one else even around. In the end, it
becomes perhaps the loveliest explanation for a complete mental collapse that
weve ever heard.
But it was his next recording project, a psychedelic wonder work designed
to sum up his sentiments in a glittering little symphony of abstract poetry and
powerful studio sounds, that really began to sink Brian Wilson. When The
Beach Boys found out what their leader was intending to accomplish, and
what he needed them to do in order to help make it happen, they didnt just
balkthey walked. And all because of lines like Light the camp and fire
mellow, cabin essence timely hello. Talk about a change; this was to be an
evolutionary leap forward into the complete unknown. How else could he
possibly hope to compete with what The Beatles were cooking up over at
Abbey Road Studios? Well, he couldnt, of course. The word peer doesnt
apply to The Beatles.
But what Brian could do and what he did do so well was to be the best
version of himself that he could possibly be. Lindsey Buckingham, the
volatile guitarist/producer for Fleetwood Mac, and one of many talented
musicians who have declared their careers to be utterly inspired by
Wilson, expressed it perfectly in one of his appreciations of The Beach Boys
magic.
The Beach Boys showed the way, and not just to California. Sure, they may
have sold the California Dream to a lot of people, but for me, it was Brian
Wilson showing how far you might have to go in order to make your own
musical dream come true.6
The trouble was, however, that Brian Wilson could not go as far as that. . .
he could only go this far and no further. Pet Sounds, his attempt to outdo
The Beatles Rubber Soul, only resulted in inspiring The Beatles to create
Revolver, and then while attempting to outdo that particular dizzying masterpiece by producing a prodigious song-cycle-opera in homage to the roots of
Americana, The Beatles dropped the atom bomb of all experimental studio
albums, Sergeant Pepper. So Smile, Brians own little psychedelic symphony,
took a long vacation.
Sylvie Simmonss take on the great Brian mythology was apt when she
wrote a Mojo Magazine piece titled, Smile? Dont Mind If I Do, in which
37
she characterized the holy grail of lost albums: It was due in January 1967
but the Beach Boys Smile LP was shelved when its creator Brian Wilson
refused to finish it.
Pops lost masterpiece. The sand pit in the living room, the dope tent in the
den, recordings made at the bottom of an empty swimming pool, session
musicians singing into their instruments and harmonizing on vegetables, an
outbreak of fires in Los Angeles, humor and paranoia, universal love, Mike
Love, and some very bad vibes. Simmons wrote:
Of all the legends of lost songs, lost weekends and lost minds in rock
history, nothing holds a candle to the mythical Great Lost Album: Smile.
The album Brian Wilson began recording in 196624 years old and at his
creative peak, and abandoned in 1967, a terrified, bed-ridden, mentally ill
emotional wreck.7
The music he was trying to produce, a perfectly balanced abstract painting

of sounds, was his joyous celebration of the summer of love, and Wilson was
increasingly being recognized in serious music circles as the next step in the
evolution of songwriting. Leonard Bernstein invited him onto a national television show featuring Americas newest composers. Solo at the piano, Wilson
did a version of the song Surfs Up, planned as the pivotal core of Smile, in
which he reached a spooky peak of perfection.
That song alone could have been just as drastic a telegram to his legions of
fans as the one Dylan sent out when he plugged into an amplifier. Things have
changed, the song seems to announce in its melancholy soaring tones, Im not
exactly that Beached Boy you used to know and love.
Another chronicler of the rise and fall and eventual rise again of Brain
Wilson, James Cunningham wrote evocatively in a piece called How Brian
Wilson Found His Smile about the pressures that swamped the youthful
genius.
In 1966, Brian Wilson was at the top of the star making machinery heap.
Bernstein would proclaim Wilson one of Americas most significant
composers. The lyrics to Surfs Up revealed a whole new Brian Wilson,
one removed from Pet Soundss aching odes to teenage loveand a universe
away from the paeans to girls, surf and hot rods of early Beach Boys hits.
Lets call it The Beach Boys own Gothic American pop soap opera: a family
well beyond dysfunction, drugs, Dennis Wilsons dalliance with Charles
Manson, an obese Brian Wilson in a sandbox full of dog feces, madness,
collapse.8
The album covers were ready, the pressing plant was ready, the label had
produced both posters and radio promo spots, the public was ready, The
Beatles were definitely ready. But Brian balked, and walked. He cancelled
production and withdrew for a long, long time. According to him,
they decided to put it on the shelf for a while. According to some witnesses
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to the events at the time, Wilson simply was unable to carry on personally or
function professionally anymore.
It might have been the drugs, or the nascent mental illness that hounds
him to this day, but Wilson cracked.9 Still, the deep underground influence
of the album continued to flow unabated, and eventually to everyones
irony-drenched surprise, Smile somehow slowly made its way back to the
surface of pop cultures consciousness.
Cunningham wrote,
What emerges is a deeply troubledyet proudartist who believes his day
of vindication has arrived. In 2003, 37 years after Smile screeched to a halt,
Van Dyke Parks (Brians co-writer) received a call one day from Wilson,
who told him that he wanted to finish composing Smile, make a new recording of it, and take it on tour. Adds Parks, I cannot tell you how stunning it
is to see this come to life. I thought I would carry this project, like a dead
child, to my grave.10
Brian Wilsons second life, the second act that Americans, according to
F. Scott Fitzgerald, never get, had finally arrived. But way back in 1968, his
three-piece rock opera about America, a happy teenage symphony to God,
would be cannibalized by The Beach Boys, who had managed to reassert their
authority, and spread it across a number of lesser records after Brians
meltdown. Surfs Up would resurface on the album of the same name
released by The Beach Boys in 1971. And thus the long wait would begin,
filled only with occasional esoteric bootlegs and the arcane compilations of
the fetishists.
It is another couple of songs which seem to serve best as the dark mirror with
which to capture Brian Wilsons elusive genius: one is called Cabinessence,
the other Till I Die. Both songs drove some of his former ardent fans, and
especially his former writing partner Mike Love, simply beyond distraction.
And it is for that reason that those songs serve as the best emblems of the kind
of lofty creative transition that Wilson was searching for. By this time, his lyrics
had become almost as obscure as Dylans. Maybe even more so.
Cabinessence, one of the most beautiful and strange songs ever written,
should have been on Smile but ended up on the later record 20/20. It has
been parsed for meaning by Wilson-lovers for years, even though it resists
any easy definitions, just as everything else pertaining to this paradoxical
artist does.
In the song, Wilsons language drifts lazily from you windblown facing
to romantic fields, to crows, and then dissipates again with the thresher
and hover the wheat field. Questions dominate the song, with who ran
the iron horse? standing starkly in the midst of these wandering images.
39
One wonders, though, why earlier collaborator and cousin Mike Love, who
was able to deliver such quirky lines as those in the earlier Beach Boys hit
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, would have had such difficulty with those evocative and dreamy lyrics. But then again, Love has always taken himself far
too seriously to have any linguistic fun.
Loves and Wilsons feud over Brians new direction in 1967 has since
solidified into one of the great anecdotes of pop music culture. History has
managed to elevate Wilson to the status of a prophetic savant who triumphed
in the end, while Mike Love has been relegated, along with his other original
alumnus, Al Jardine, to touring the world as an old man, playing in casinos
and delivering the ancient pop songs that his cousin wrote 45 years ago as a
teenager. Not a pretty sight.
Til I Die is an even more compelling and demanding declaration of a
poetic young mans challenges. It appeared on the 1971 Surfs Up album, just
before the last title track. For me, it captures the essence of both the tragedy
and the triumph of Brian Wilson by enshrining his hyper-sensitive sense of
self in a mode of perpetual transcendence. Wilson sings of a general sense of
uncertainty, where elemental forcesthe ocean, a landslide, the wind
sweep him up and push him on towards an unknown and even variable destination. After chronicling this metaphysical journey, he asks, How long will
the wind blow. . .Oh. Until I die, repeated ten times, just in case the listener
missed the point.
Alas, but there is one more thing that Wilson will be until he dies: one of
our greatest and most inspiring singer-songwriters, elevated to Olympian status by every serious musician since. Admired by the rest of us for his fierce
devotion to the muse that fuels him. Loved by all for his living example as a
creative human being who survives his own demons daily. And by surviving,
he demonstrates to us that survival is possible, and maybe even probable,
with enough poetry.
That, in the end, is what we most want our poets to do. They tell us dreams
that keep us from falling asleep in the darkness alone. Brian Wilson was a
dream teller extraordinaire. Even when his dream turned into a nightmare,
his abundance of raw spirit allowed him to carry on telling it like it might
have been. Which is why it is so natural for us to go on listening. As long as
there are dreams to listen to, there will be audiences ready to open their ears
and hearts, and yes, even their wallets, to the wounded minstrel. To the kind
of artist Anselm Kiefer once described as a story teller with a broken story.
3
The Torch Bearer:
Joni Mitchell
Busy Being Free
You could write a song about some kind of emotional problem you are having, but
it would not be a good song, in my eyes, until it went through a period of sensitivity
to a moment of clarity. Without that moment of clarity to contribute to the song,
its just complaining.1
Joni Mitchell
Blue, here is a shell for you, inside youll hear a sigh, she warbled in a voice
somewhere between pain and bliss.
Joni Mitchell is not just one of the greatest female singer-songwriters in the
world. She is one of the greatest singer-songwriters in the world, period. Coming of both personal and creative age in 1967, the same magic summer that
brought Wilsons mature emergence as an artist, and arriving apparently as
fully formed as Dylan did, without any real apprenticeship, Mitchell matches
the heartfelt content and soulful delivery of both peers. But she also adds a
deep feminine well of feelings to which she bravely returns time and again
in order to dispatch her torchy reports to the world. Sometimes thrown at
the world.
Most importantly, she has that personal intimacy with anguish that often
provides the best singer-songwriters with both their material and the
combustible fuel with which to transmit it in performance and recordings.
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Dark Mirror
When she was inducted into the 2007 Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame,
her acceptance speech was so succinct it was surprising, coming as it did
from an artist whose business is words: I need to explore and discover, its
just in my stars. Theres nothing I can do about it.
Many of her songs, originating from the depth of her early private experiences, have also become emblems of the times in which they were produced.
They are signifiers, not just for the Canadian culture that created her perspective, but also of the global attitude she eventually began to reflect so ideally.
Clouds, Both Sides Now, Big Yellow Taxi, and, of course, Woodstock
(an event she didnt actually attend) are shared brands now, as are the many
deft experiments of her later mature period.
Critic Guy Dixon asked a pertinent question while musing over Mitchells
induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, one that applies to all
composers of anthemic songs that somehow find their way into everyones
heart and mind, reflecting what is there as if they were written specifically
for them. Once songs such as these become so legendary, do they effectively
belong to everyone, with artists losing possession of them?2
James Taylor, one of Mitchells many fans who is himself a practitioner of
the same arcane craft, turning personal lead into public gold, adds a note of
clarification:
Ideally, a handful of songs that one had written over a lifetime of writing songs
will resonate so much with people that they mean a lot, that they are commonly held property. They mean so much to so many people that they become,
certainly with a number of Jonis songs, part of the cultural fabric, and contribute to the modern cultural myth that people use to assemble their own lives.3
Of course, this is also the ideal definition of what it means to be a dark

mirror and how the reflections in those mirrors manage to speak on our
own behalf. We start to assemble our own lives based on the truths and
insights of those gifted individuals who sometimes seem to be suffering,
professionally and publicly, for a living, and to sing about it, as if in stubborn
jubilation.
Mitchell has been suffering in public, or else exploring and discovering as she
puts it more creatively, for a long, long time now. Another Canadian music
journalist, Greg Quill, has observed that she is perhaps the best exponent of
a songwriting tradition that has long nourished that country. It could even
be argued that the simple song provides the common language that binds
and illuminates the nation more richly and completely than any other of our
cultural endeavours in literature, film, drama, symphonic music, opera and
even the visual arts.4
But, simple song? Joni Mitchells songs are anything but simple. Yet part
of their huge charm is that they seem to be simplelike all the greatest art,
they seem to be straightforward but are far from being easy. She herself
helped clarify this misnomer:
The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell
43
The chords I like are complex. Theyre fresh in the history of harmony.
Theyre mostly suspended chords. Its still taught in the schools not to stay
on the suspended chord too long. I call them chords of inquiry. Theyre
unresolved, they went against the grain of normal composition. To enjoy
my music, you need depth and emotionality. Those two traits are bred out
of the white, straight males who control the press.5
Sorry Guy and Greg.

Luckily for all of us, Joni Mitchell did not study in those schools which
disparage suspension and the unresolved. Luckily, she studied in the same
school the best songwriters always attend, the street. And when one graduates from the street, as did Dylan and his inheritors, you learn quickly that
resolution is misanthropic. Resolution is anti-human, it is not our lot in life,
as the best songwriters tell us again and again. If only we would listen.
Joel Kroeker believes that our song sensibility owes a lot to the Toronto
musical crucible of the 60s and 70s, his own included:
What made Canadian songwriters different after that was the quality of
their stories. They looked into their own psyches to find universal feelings
and ideas that others shared.
Its too easy to go with the first rhyme that pops into your head. Theres
nothing superficial about Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchells lyrics. They
often went into very dark places in their souls to find a poetic view of life.
Thats the standard I hold myself to.6
Another Canadian writer and also a lover of Mitchells craft and style, Ron
Hynes, points out, Its almost second nature for us to document
ourselves in song. Weve been doing it for hundreds of years, long before
there was a music industry. Songs were written, still are, to document who
and where people were and what happened to them. Some songs become so
entrenched that they simply move like air from generation to generation.7
So it has certainly been with the deceptively simple odes of the one busy
being Joni Mitchell.
Like the careers of Dylan and Wilson, her career has stretched miraculously
over four decadesthe same four decades, in fact. Her early work is scintillatingly soulful, while her later work is soulfully scintillating, tied together
by a continuum of careful craftsmanship and manic creativity. The critic
Richard Ouzounian called her a young old soul but then again, youth,
middle age, and old age dont seem to be words that apply very much to
the mercurial Ms. Mitchell.
Ouzounians observations were made in his own appreciation of Mitchell
when she was inducted, and they focus quite rightly on the shock to our
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Dark Mirror
cultural systems of the arrival of a perfectly matured voice that was contained
in the blonde wisp of a 22-year-old visionary.
He alludes to the intensity of her formative years:
This burst of songwriting activity followed an astonishing two year period
in her life that included the loss of her virginity, an unwanted pregnancy, a
marriage of convenience, giving her child up and a divorce from the man
she thought was going to save her. Is it any wonder that a sensitive young
woman with an urge to communicate her feelings in song would have so
much to say?8
Her life has been a rough one, providing more than enough raw material
for what would amount to a kind of creative crucible out of which all her
poetic musings would be channeled. From the middle of Saskatchewan,
afflicted with polio at the age of 9, an art student at 20, an accomplished
painter as well as poet, Mitchell tried briefly to play the role of wife and singing partner with Chuck Mitchell, but all she really got out of the arrangement
was the name by which we all know her today.
Ouzounians take is a very clear-eyed and personal one, similar to the way
Mitchell makes all of us feel: For nearly forty years, fans such as myself have
sung her melodies, memorized her lyrics and marveled at the knack she had of
illuminating the dark corners of our souls where we thought we dwelt alone.9
What a perfect grasp of that role and function she has in our personal
development. Illuminating the dark corners where we thought we dwelt
alone. That is, after all, why she is among the most stringent and brave of all
our dark mirrors. She has that merciless way of casting her critical gaze on
herself first and on the world second, and then perhaps most witheringly,
on the music industry third.
Larry David Smith has characterized what she does as operating within the
torch song tradition. While I hadnt quite identified it that way over decades of listening, it does seem to be an accurate assessment of the flavor and
structure of many of her wonderful songs. But she doesnt only sing about a
private love affair with someone for whom she continues to carry a torch.
If anything, she also carries a torch for situations and circumstances, and for
the questionable collective destiny we are designing for ourselves.
Mitchell carries a torch for nature, in her insistence that the world has taken
a disastrous turn away from what she refers to as the Eden experience; she
carries a torch for art and poetry, in a commercial world gone mad for musical
money and overdevelopment. This has not always made her as popular as
she was in her meteoric beginnings. Many members of her audience wanted
more of her romantic menu, her gorgeous odes to love lost or found, rather
than her angry sentiments about what went wrong with a beautiful world
and how we might go about repairing the mess in which we find ourselves.
She wasnt happy in 1998 with the tepid response to her then latest record,
Taming the Tiger, and so she moved instead closer to the silent world of
45
painted images where she first started, rather than the spoken pictures of her
life of song. Most of us associate highly evocative images with that haunting
voice of hers.
But those early personal stories, sung-spoken in a harrowingly intimate
voice, were the primary way for her to free herself of her own beginnings,
an urge she shares with almost all of her peers included in this book.
For Mitchell, playing her guitar gave her what she once called a one way
ticket over the next hill, and away from home. She has also been very forthcoming over the years that, for her, songwriting was a mechanism with which
she wrote her way out of difficulty and disturbance. She has even intimated that in her experience she has learned to be grateful for trouble since
it enabled her to delve more deeply into both her own condition and the
human condition. Naturally enough, well see that particular interpretation
of events recur over and over in this diverse community of creative strangers.
Mitchell, after her early role as a duo partner dissolved, along with the
marriage, launched herself into a series of song statements that were so personal that they left critics with no choice but to dub her a female Dylan. She
is naturally a little churlish about such an association, and yet in essence she
does indeed operate with the same set of emotional tools as does the Master.
For her, songs are charts of journeys, and she never puts lipstick or
makeup on the truth.
The result, like with all the best practitioners of the ancient craft, invites us
into a musical world which we can feel but cant explain, perhaps largely
because what she does so well is precisely what Dylan, Wilson, and a few
others also managed to master. She has on many occasions stated that her
basic modus operandi is to erase who you are and let your songs be your
voice. As in, allowing songs to be a kind of stand-in for an actually discernible self, a screen in other words, presented to the world for interpretation.
Her construction of, and revelation through, a song-self makes her another
ideal mirror with which to access the undercurrents we all possess but
seldom are able to rationally articulate. Her first producer, the great singersongwriter David Crosby, founder of both The Byrds and the Crosby Stills &
Nash supergroup, was also her last. Even though the results were quite scintillating for a youthful debut recordingknown by two titles, Songs For a
Seagull and Joni Mitchell (released in March 1968)she was so immediately
mature as an artist that for the rest of her career she solo-produced her own
albums. Quite a technical achievement indeed, and one that indicates the
level of personal control and commitment she would exhibit throughout her
long career.
The first album she produced herself was the shimmering folk work,
Clouds, in May 1969. This was followed in breathtakingly rapid succession
by Ladies of the Canyon in April 1970 and her truly gorgeous masterpiece, Blue,
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Dark Mirror
in June 1971. David Crosby, after watching her perform one night in a Florida
club called The Gaslight South, reports that he was so stunned by the
completely developed level of her craft that he literally lost his balance. Of
course, he was rather prone to losing it.
Crosby, up until that moment, had always assumed that artists tend to
arrive as a boulder and knock the corners off yourself until you are smooth
like a river stone, presumably by both living and writing hard. But here
was someone who arrived perfectly smoothed out as an artist, requiring no
evolutionary growth. She was simply perfect, as is. He said, She sang for
me, she was my voice, she was everyones voice!
And being everyones voice is what makes her an ideal dark mirror.
If Dylan is a story teller, whose story becomes more and more refined and
polished with age, and if Wilson is a dream teller, whose dreams dont seem
to tarnish because theyre made of some unearthly angelic metal, then
Mitchell is a torch bearer, whose flame appears even brighter since it pierces
a darkness too deep to imagine. The darkness of the human heart in extremis.
It provokes echoes of Rainer Maria Rilke when he asked his rhetorical question: surely all art is the result of having been in some danger, of having gone
all the way to the end, to where one can go no further?
That is certainly the case in the graceful long-distance race of Mitchells
work and career. Its a veritable roller coaster ride of ups and downs through
an extremely painful carnival midway that includes isolation, polio, teenage
pregnancy, forced marriage, child abandonment, divorce, drugs, love affairs
aplenty, and sonic acres of inventive contemporary songs crafted while being
pursued by the twin demons of depression and a taste for complete and utter
independence. As a woman, as an artist, as a person, Mitchell is one of the
most idiosyncratic and uncompromising geniuses of our shared culture.
Sure, her personal song-stories, as Larry David Smith points out very
eloquently, are remnants or vestiges of a bygone age occupied by both medieval troubadours and modern Tin Pan Alley songsmiths. They are indeed torch
songs, sort of, and I appreciate the entertaining insight; however, for me it is as
the bearer of a torch leading us into the void ahead, by virtue of her own brilliant talent and her own unique pathological needs as an artist that she matters
most. As a torch bearer, she is far closer to the notion of a cultural canary we
use, just as we use all singer-songwriters, as a test subject who suffers down
below on our behalf, and makes it all somehow vaguely better by doing so.
Now, torch bearers arent always popular, if only because they tend to illuminate unseen things and to palpate unfelt sensations which on occasion can
hurt us as deeply as we can bear. At such times, however, we are reminded
that poets have that special relationship with the truth, one that enables them
to also tell us certain lies to keep our hearts from breaking. Artifice is a better
word than lie: the artifice that all artists use to represent the unnameable and
to express the inexpressible. After all, how else could they do their jobs?
As for Mitchells job, she was at the top of her game almost instantly. Hauntingly beautiful as a woman, radically strong as a person, and melodically gifted
47
as a musician-poet, she strode into history as if she really did belong there. Like
Dylan, she was and is a troubadour, and as such, she has special functions to
perform in our society and its culture, especially the subculture of love.
Love knows no boundaries, and the troubadours charted romantic
courses that transcended borders, creeds or social affiliations. Assuredly, they
chronicled an essential part of the human apparatus. They told stories
of love.10
In Smiths astute reading of the tradition of singing stories of love, he goes
on to allude to their pertinence to our own appreciation of the dim and murky
reflections that possess and obsess the singing subjects who write the songs
under study. When music historians speak of the love song as a songwriting
theme, their thoughts instantly turn to the troubadours of Southern France
and their pivotal contributions to that genres development.11 He goes on
to quote Richard Wilhelm in a clarification, The troubadours did not leave
us tourist guidebooks any more than they left candid memoirs of their sex
lives or propaganda pieces about the superiority of women. They did however leave us their poetry, and this heritage binds them to us directly.12
As Smith points out, there are inherent boundaries to the love song format,
even if there are none separating the people who consume them.
As twentieth-century songwriters massaged the love song, searching for
some unique sentiment or insight, they encountered the same limitations that
hounded their French predecessors.13
In fact, there was once an old love song that cheekily used its own tradition as
the subject for itself, the 1930s charmer, What Can You Say in a Love Song That
Hasnt Been Said Before? What indeed? How many ways are there to actually
say something that simple? Millions, it turns out, if not more. Smith wrote:
While many Tin Pan Alley writers searched for adroit ways to communicate
I Love You in 32 bars, a few pursued alternative formulas. One possibility
involved the creation of musical hybrids that synthesized the strengths of
existing genres into new forms. With that, the torch song was born.. . .
The advent of the celebrity singer-songwriter changed everything. The
composer-singer-songwriter roles converged into a single entity. The
celebrity-singer-songwriter composite sparked the rebirth of songs with
public personalities as it retrieved that tradition from the dusty court chambers that time forgot. . .like the troubadours of old, they brought personalities to their work in a fashion that made it original and memorable.
Unlike the troubadours of old, they performed their work before
international audiences who instantly praised or damned their efforts.14
Praise for Mitchell was hard earned, well deserved, and equally fleeting,
just as soon as she did what all the best and bravest singer-songwriters
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Dark Mirror
always do: evolve, change, and create new and different sounds. Audiences
generally dont want new and different; they tend to be nourished by a steady
diet of what they fell in love with you for in the first placenot some exotic
dish you concocted after securing their adoration.
I remember one folk festival Mitchell attended in Toronto around 1972,
where her presence attracted a large number of other stars who were not
appearing but who had to travel to see and hear her. Among them was a
ragged-looking Bob Dylan wearing a red bandana, carrying a bottle of red
wine in one hand and a perpetual cigarette in the other. I almost knocked
him over in the rush to get a seat on the grass in front of Mitchells tiny stage
under the swaying trees. She had just followed up her majesterial record,
Blue, with the gorgeously surprising For the Roses.
What we were all (including Dylan) tripping over ourselves to see and hear
was something rare and precious, something that only comes along about as
rarely as Dylan himself. This was the early and shockingly mature voice
and music of a young woman who plumbed the depths of her own soul in
order to provide commentary on those aspects of the public world that
enraged her, as well as those aspects of her private world that strained so
painfully to be expressed.
This modus operandi, often accurately referred to as confessional songs
delivered in a deceptively romantic vessel, was stunning to behold, especially
given her arrival on the scene apparently fully formed and ready to roll into
the arms of international fans. Her songs messages have remained as crystalline and clear as that first outing produced by a smitten David Crosby. Everyone who ever met her was equally smitten, including Crosbys musical
partner Graham Nash. The rest of us were content to be smitten from a distance. It was that apparent absence of any distance between her and her
music, and her and us, which caused us all to fall in love with her songs in
a surrogate fashion. Cactus Tree, from that first album in 1968, is perhaps
a youthful summation of almost everything that would come later, even or
especially the later sonic experiments that on the surface seemed to leave folk
music far behind. The song celebrates a variety of men in her life but quickly
heads to her favorite territorythe ambivalence of belonging to someone
else, the pressures that a lovers expectations can wreak on us, and Mitchells
own refusal to meet anyone elses standards but her own. They have
laughed inside her laughter, now she rallies her defenses.
Virtually all of Mitchells best songs are literally about rallying her defenses
and refusing to submit to the expectations of either lovers or the music industry
itself, which she has always seen as a problematic artistic relationship between
craft and commerce. In one of her great early hits, often misinterpreted due to
its rollicking rhythms, the song Help Me from 1974s wildly popular Court
and Spark, she makes her case abundantly clear. Id go back there [to Paris,
where she felt entirely unbound] tomorrow but for the work Ive taken on, stoking the star making machinery, behind the popular song.
49
Few artists, with the possible exceptions of Dylan, Lennon, and Cobain,
have ever encapsulated their dread of celebrity and stardom with such
sarcastic wit and verve. But The Torch Bearer does it in her own unique
way. Like Dylan and Wilson, she also risked regularly alienating her established audience in the interest of stretching herself creatively and continuing to grow within the craft of her medium. Mitchell was and is a slave to
risk, as are all the greatest songwriters, and all the greatest artists in any
medium for that matter, so she plunged forward regardless of the commercial results.
The Hissing of Summer Lawns, from 1975, was her first radical departure
from the security of the folk foundations that had both informed her own
growth as a writer and which she had, in turn, expanded in form and evolved
in content. Her efforts were not well received, except by the lovers of
her already highly experimental music who wished to join her on her excursions into the unknown reaches of free jazz and ever more unusual tuning
techniques.
She kept on keeping on despite an abrupt downturn in the worshipful
reception; she was by then used to having accorded her work. Hejira (1976)
and Don Juans Reckless Daughter (1977) extended her artistic reach remarkably, though neither one was fully recognized to be what both wereamong
her most adventurous and mature work. But audiences are audiences, and
they adhere to a menu of their own choosing, so as time went on, Mitchell
was finding herself more and more alone on her sojourns beyond folk.
This had little effect on her creative psyche, since from the origins of her
youthful flowering, that kind of solitude, though sometimes suffocating with
sadness, was the wellspring from which she drew her unique voice, words,
and music. Not even recording with the magnificent and mad legend Charles
Mingus (in 1979, close to his death) afforded her the credibility she so richly
deserved. You dont get to play with Mingus unless you are the real thing.
He was hardly able to bear lesser jazz players, let alone an interloper from
the folk-pop world, so his ready acceptance of her stature should have told
everyone something about her true validity as a musical artist.
It was not until 1982, with Wild Things Run Fast, that she made a much
heralded return to the so-called conventions of classical songwriting, even
though from her very beginnings she had always managed to subvert and
enhance those very same standards. Mitchell has continued to explore her
own muse with dogged determination, in regular releases that followed a
slight hiatus during which her disdain for the industry and her ongoing interest in painting allowed her a break from the constant supply of elegant
sadness which we had all become so attached to over the years.
Her masterpiece still remains the scintillating Blue, from 1971, a recording
that simply gets stronger with each passing year. This collection of almost
perfect songs, ideal production values, and carefully calculated instrumentation remains the truest testament to what has now, post-Joni, come to
commonly be called the confessional style of songwriting.
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She moves from declaring that she is on a lonely road, traveling and traveling, looking for something and asking what it might be, to explaining that
songs are like tattoos. And in the title song itself she intones, Well everybodys saying that hells the hippest way to go. Shes not so sure, but is
going to take a look around it though.
She has been taking a look around it for a long time now; her reports from the
battlefield of the aching heart have since become signposts for millions of unrelated relationships. She closed her masterpiece with a message that could apply
to all great songwriters, not just to the legions of people for whom she is an
emblem: All good dreamers pass this way some day. . .only a dark cocoon
before I get my wings and fly away. Although, Mitchell has always had her
wings, from the very beginning, and if she carries a torch for us, or for the entire
planet, she holds it so high we can barely see it. But we can feel its warmth and
imagine its flickering emotional light. And sometimes that is enough.
One of the more ironic codas to the Joni Mitchell canon is the fact that last
year she signed a deal to release her new album, Shine, through the Starbucks
record label now also favored by Sir Paul McCartney. Its her first record since
2002, when the world was certain her distaste for the recording industry had
reached its zenith and it was bye-bye forever. But wait, arent they one of the
companies that paved over paradise to put up a parking lot? Go figure.
4
The Role Player:
David Bowie
The Man Who Sold the World
He has a melodic sense thats well above anyone else in rock and roll. Most people
could not sing some of his melodies. I saw him play here in New York on his last
tour, and it was one of the greatest rock shows Ive ever seen. At least as far as
white people go. Seriously.1
Lou Reed
A very strange singer who used to be called David Jones chirped in a deceptively charming voice, You and I will rise up all the way. All because of what
you are: The Prettiest Star. Though he was referring to his token wife Angie,
we all knew he also meant himself.
Imagine, having to change your real name to a stage name, all because
another singer who was already more famous than you, Davy Jones, might
cause confusion as to who was who and which was which. The first adaptation by this superlative mutant performer perhaps? Meanwhile, the aging
former Monkee is relegated to performing at Casino concerts with aging
former Beach Boys, while the newly minted David Bowie managed to scale
the heights of stardom and celebrity in the most audaciously camp manner
since Josephine Baker. And, he managed to do it for 40 years!
The legendary chameleon of pop music, whose talents also include acting
in both film and theatre, is clearly one of the ideal examples of a master
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singer-songwriter of our time. This is especially true of his compelling range

of diva-like personas devised to tell stories in song that are an immediate
mirror of the very society that consumes them for comfort. But Bowies mirror
is simply sprayed with irony; his songs tell of a society of the spectacle
beyond belief, a society of subcultures and masqueradesa world just waiting for the arrival of David Bowie, an artist who seemed to fall to earth at just
the right time.
Bowie is one creative figure who has managed to completely merge his
personal pathology with his professional mythology, including his obsessions
with alchemy, magic and protofascist imagery, all channeled through his art
and behavior via his extraordinarily elastic personality and unique physical
presence. He is a cultured savage howling at humanity; we love to watch
him recoil into his own utterly cool weirdness.
I first encountered the exotic sounds of David Bowie back in 1972 upon entering an expatriate bar in Ibiza, Spain. The entire small room was sitting enraptured, listening to his latest record, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars. It was as if the whole tavern had been lifted off the crowded
hippy islands rusty ground and had started to float away through space, a
private spaceship traveling towards an unknown destination called David.
Bowie is still traveling, some 36 years later, and we are still passengers on
his strange and beautiful craft, although the speed of his trajectory has
slowed somewhat slightly since his heart attack in 2004 (and which may
prevent any further stage jumping in the future). Every so often I imagine that
little expatriate bar, still floating off somewhere in a dimension where it is
permanently 1972.
Yet somehow, just as mysteriously as his mysterious music, Bowie turned
60 years old in 2007, an occasion which prompted the entertainment editor
of one paper to claim for him, an evergreen fresh status, which differentiates him so dramatically from Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, or most other
members of the four-decade-old rock club. Remember, these are the people who
invented rock music, and incredibly enough, the art form is only slightly
older than they are.
In that same piece, the entertainment editor Ben Rayner pointed out,
Ancient and decrepit though it may seem, rock n roll is still staggering
through its first generational iteration. There are no rules for how rock should
age, because the original practitioners are still, in large part, writing the first set
of precedents. Still, if we were to pick an ideal role model for aging tastefully in
rock n roll, David Bowies career arc would seem the right way to go.2
It should be abundantly clear by now that rock music, the global force that
emerged from rock n roll, is still a new musical form, just as contemporary
post-bop jazz is a new lineage descended from the giant steps of Bird and
Trane. We ourselves saw rocks mutant birth in the mid-60s, and we ourselves
The Role Player: David Bowie
53
will have to assess its rapid changes of context, form, and content, and, eventually, even its reception into the canon of American indigenous music, albeit
on the dissonant side of the scale, next to jazz and blues. One blue is more
than enough, thanks.
What better role model for continuous creative evolution than the role
player par excellence himself, Mr. Jones? He doesnt just tell stories, he performs them like a mime, but a mime who also sings aloud, imagining a new
language of Artaud-like gestures. Listening to Bowie was like being swept
into a phenomenal new hybrid of multiple musical and theatrical formats
which was both sudden and accidental: the sparklingly idiosyncratic worlds
of Hunky Dory, The Man Who Sold the World, and Space Oddity. Bowie was
already moving precariously forward, slouching towards stardom like some
rough beast waiting to be born.
By the time I saw him in Toronto in 1974, he had already morphed into the
Aladdin Sane persona, and then abruptly left it behind to mesmerize us with
his Diamond Dogs persona, the second and third of many masks slipped on
and ripped off with such wild and reckless creative abandon that the only
historical precedent might be the outrageous brilliance of Oscar Wilde. Bowie
was our Oscar. And unlike Dylan, Bowie held his masks aloft so we could all
see the dangling strings attached.
Rayner is so right when he astutely observes that this exotic alien figure,
from poetic old Brixton England,
appears to be aging in a different temporal dimension than his dinosaur
peers. Not just because the cat looks impossibly good for someone who
spent the 70s on a transatlantic chemical rampage, or because he can lay
claim to fathering a child at 53 with his supermodel wife Iman six years
ago, but because his age feels eternally youthful.3
Like the ineffable Warhol, who dyed his hair silver and then donned a grey
wig as a very young man in order to preempt entropy (thus remaining forever
in the present tense), Bowies embrace of a bewildering range of surreal selves
to mime his story, and to sell his songs, has allowed him to remain apparently
timeless behind his magic wardrobe of sleekly designed and seductively
delivered theatrical stage roles.
Unlike Dylan, Wilson, or Mitchell, who all encountered audience resistance
to their own growth as songwriters if it meant changing what was most cherished about their styles, Bowie managed the supreme feat of making artistic
change one of the central tenets of his entire slippery enterprise. He sells
change wholesale. One of his most famous songs, from 1971s still fresh
sounding Hunky Dory, summed it up perfectly by making changes the
whole point of being a creative artist.
Whenever reaching a goal, Bowie seems to find the reward unsatisfying.
In the song Changes he stated, So I turned my self to face me, but Ive
never caught a glimpse, of how the others must see the faker.
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Bowies audience, much to his good fortune, is one that assumes the same
masks as he does in order to deliver his message, in order to watch the spectacle and fully participate. The fans want to be invited into totally new theatrical zones of behavior. Rayner, as a music critic, reflected their appetites
and interests perfectly when he declared, If an artist is challenging himself,
he should also be challenging his audience. That, more than anything, is what
keeps the man young I think.4
As to his astonishingly mutable appearance, with his eyes of different
shades (not really different colors, his left eye was permanently dilated after
an early fistfight), David Buckley commented in the liner notes to the 2002
reissue of Ziggy Stardust: Bowies was an alien physiognomy, not literally
so, but alien to the culture of mainstream celebrity to which pop fans were
accustomed.
Alien to the mainstream indeed. Bowie had to single-handedly invent a
new stream for himself, almost along the lines of that other drastic and
dramatic outsider Captain Beefheart, who once announced, If you want to
be a different fish, you have to jump out of the school. Bowie was able to
jump right out of the pond itself, veering off into film, theatre, books, and
the fashion world in general. Iman in particular.
James Perone wrote a very useful book back in 2007 which maps the
amazing trajectories of this chameleon-like figure, and in it he quotes Stephen
Erlewine from The All Music Guide: Even when he was out of fashion in the
80s and 90s, it was clear that Bowie was one of the most influential musicians
in rock music, for better or worse.5
Perone ably charts the artists significance as a figure who generated more
contentious critical response than any performer in the modern rock era.
Bowie raised serious issues about sexual orientation in rock music, regardless of whether his claimed homosexuality was genuine or part of his
on-stage character. His regular use of theatrical personas also raises interesting issues concerning authenticity and the perception of authenticity in
rock music.6
Indeed, such questions of authenticity are at the very heart of what makes
rock music such a mirror-like vehicle for self-expression. Bowie is one of
those rare artists for whom perpetual shape-shifting makes him authentic in
the first place, as opposed to the more artificial approach of some who try
desperately to maintain a fixed personality throughout their entire careers,
rather than submitting to the natural change and evolutionary leaps that the
most creative among us are prone to seek.
Again, the best artists are always slaves to risk. Bowie has made both risk
and change his middle names. But this book is about music, not distinguished
by its ethnic or cultural origins but rather by the temperament of the emotions
it explores, and by the personal pathology of the artists who manufacture it.
55
Therefore we need to seek out the overlapping lines that trace the development of each artist within his or her own unique sensibility, and to map those
coordinates in a manner that clarifies the entire public phenomenon of
contemporary song and its place in our private lives. Our culture has contour
lines, just like any other map.
The French poet Jean Cocteau once remarked that the artist is a mirror.
When you look into an artist you are likely to find out more about yourself
than you will about him or his art. This is the exotic but nonetheless everyday idea that helps to explain why someone as outlandishly and apparently
alien, such as Bowie, still manages to reveal our own characters when we look
into his art by listening to his songs.
What do Bowies songs tell us about ourselves? We make their meanings,
constructing them out of our own interpretations of his often highly abstract
lyrics, and we consciously decide, assuming they suit our sensibility, that
even these obscure and often dank insights are still about us.
Right from the beginning, on June 1, 1967, when his first album was released
on the same day as was The Beatles Sgt. Pepper, and was instantly swamped in
its titanic wake, it was obvious that David Bowie was differentand not just
because of his appearance or personal and intimate sensibilities. The character
that David Jones chose to play in the theatre of pop music, the constructed Bowie
character, allowed him to pursue creative directions in music he would never
have considered without acknowledging himself to be an actor portraying a
pop star. Of course!
Someone once said that Elvis seemed like an actor performing the role of a
singer, an amazing singer, but a singer presented as the portrayal of such by a
consummate actor, one who had studied the role so perfectly that he ended
up being utterly convincing in his own performances. In that same spooky
way, Bowie seems to somehow perpetually move away from himself and
towards his cult of stage doppelgangers, each one used and discarded like a
snakeskin. Each one a variation on an early theme of difference and of a
mainstream in denial.
Bowie was cruising our whole culture, cruising us, and we didnt even
know it.
One of his major accomplishments, apart from survival in a culture

obsessed with youth, is the manner with which he met one of the great
challenges facing all purveyors of rock n roll musichow to overcome
the fact that it is designed for the ultra-youthful appetites for rebellion
and debauchery.
Bowie has triumphed through a stealthy and strategic use of his varied
personas in order to deliver a raucous rock message, not just to the same
audience he has always had, but to a surprisingly constant stream of young
and younger fans. Since the prime directive of rock music is young love and
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rejection of the outmoded, Bowie found a way to seduce each successive

generation of listeners by providing subtle and canny variations on this one
central message.
That central message is still about the cardinal core subject of his rock
music: sex and liberation; however, it has been channeled brilliantly and
changed provocatively by removing the central conceit from its canon: sex
with whom? Bowies answerwhich has kept his music vital for over
40 yearshave it with anyone you want!
He consistently sells the seductive message of carnal knowledge to successive youthful generations of hormone saturated consumers, while still
succeeding in selling to his original and aging audience the memories of
misspent youth beneath an elegant veneer of sneer. No one quite sneers like
Bowie, not even Elvis.
For Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground and one of our darkest
rock poets, Bowies contribution to rock n roll has been wit and sophistication.
There had been androgyny in rock from Little Richard on up, but he put his
own patina on it, to say the least. He was very aware of stagecraft, and made
an entire show out of a character, and then he left it behind. Hes always changing, so you never get tired of what hes doing. How smart can you get?7
Smart enough to put your faith in your incredible acting abilities and
manage to pull off a strange hybrid performance, half clown and half mime,
in which each scene leads to a scene in another act where the same character
returns in disguise. Again and again. Bowie man is simply brilliant at not
being there. The clown and the mime never meet together on the stage, for
they are allergic to each other. But both the clown and the mime do get to
occasionally play inside of the rough beast, as a kind of consolation prize for
cooperating all these years.
Mojo Magazine celebrated his perpetual presence and absence amongst us
for four decades by devoting one of its classic editions to him, or rather to them,
to all those many Bowies, in January 2007.
The first rock star to use his persona as a songwriting tool, the loudly
bisexual Bowie professed to be an artisan, but through the Seventies made
epoch defining, exuberant music as Aladdin Sane or Diamond Dog. Heroically
killing off each new image as it stuck, he became the white soul boy for Young
Americans, introverted iceman for the monumental Low trilogy, perfectly cast
movie alien and consummate eighties disco rocker. He remains charmingly
unpredictable, musics most articulate survivor, always stretching the
vocabulary. Theres new, theres old, theres Bowie.8
Hes chameleon, comedian, Corinthian and caricature, sang Bowie on

his groundbreaking Hunky Dory, and hes been all these and more in a
flamboyant, intriguing career.
Along the way, Bowie morphed from an early Anthony Newly whimsical
clone on drugs to the undisputed inventor of glam-rock, one of the more
57
exotic excursions taken by rock music after its first decade of raunchy
innocence.
In 1970, Bowies future wife Angie, and his producer Tony Viscontis
partner Liz Hartley, in response to his declaration that what he needed was
some hype, whipped off four flamboyant costumes to allow the players to
dissolve into their fantasy roles, kicking off what came to be known as
pantomime rock.
I thought it would be really interesting, Bowie explained with mock
innocence, if each of us adopted a persona of some kind. Because it was all
jeans and long hair at that time. But we got booed all the way through the
show. People absolutely loathed what we were doing. It was great!9
Bowie seems to have written one of his iconic tunes, The Prettiest Star, for
his newlywed wife, but he could just as easily have written it about himself.
Their liaison would last only a decade, weighed down by the bicoastal and
bisexual lifestyle that fueled both of them. During the wild ride, however,
Angie encouraged Bowie to adopt as many outrageous styles as possible,
everything from wearing womens dresses to the incredible I Love Lucy mullet
hairstyle of his alter-ego, Ziggy Stardust.
A drag-queen cult formed behind me. I said, fine. That was how Bowie
summed up the publics reaction to his rapidly mutating performance art
style, a style which often collided with how perfectly crafted his songs were
at heart, while also concealing a little of the extreme darkness at their core
with characteristic whimsy and wit.
For me, his two best albums still remain The Man Who Sold the World and
Hunky Dory, both from 1971. They are the secret locations where he buried
many of his treasured meanings, content to which he would return for years
to come. It was on Hunky Dory that he actually billed himself as the actor
in an open admission that his approach to singing songs was the emotional
equivalent to throwing his voice the same way a ventriloquist does, except we
imagine we are seeing a character perform the songs.
Was Bowie the first rock star to use his personas as a songwriting tool?
Well, Dylan told his stories in a variety of masked voices, but the only persona
that Robert Zimmerman ever created, and for whom he continued to write
for, was the persona of Dylan.
Brian Wilson told us his dreams, but always in a heartbreakingly singular
form of authenticity, or as what a raw human might look like with absolutely
no persona at all, for all to see and hear. Joni Mitchell developed a confessional approach that eschews the assumption of any persona other than the
independent artist who is painting a picture we can listen to.
So it seems true that Bowie alone slithered into and peeled out of a
cast of characters designed to be perceived as much a contemporary art
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performance installation as any pop entertainment spectacle. Each new

psychic skin gave him the raw material for a new reiteration of his basic,
even primal, themes.
David Bowie seems to be a perfect personification of a thought attributed to
Ralph Bunche: If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up as a person.
Bowie has wrapped himself up several times, a puzzle within an enigma,
within a mystery. Martin Aston has written about the gothic splendor of
Bowies lifestyle at this stage:
Fired up on potent hash oil, Bowies hunger for spiritual knowledge began
to ferment. Buddhism and Bob Dylan gave way to German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche and his notions of the ubermensch, the superman.
The initial result of this fevered imagination was the intellectually and
musically heavy Man Who Sold the World, a monstrous netherworld of sex,
space, violence and insanity. It embraced black magic, S and M, and a male
sexual encounter with a frightening deity that could be God or Satan. The
song After All included the Crowley line do what you will and in The
Supermen Bowie imagined (by way of Lovecraft) a race of advanced mortals
whod once ruled the earth but were later sent into exile. The Nazis occult
wing also believed this was the case.10
Bowie continued to stretch the limits of his audiences ears and minds on
Hunky Dory, inviting fans to follow his wanderlust in search for the meaning
of the search. On a near descent into a staggering cocaine addiction that
almost consumed his core, he still managed to send messages from his damp
skull out into the pop culture at large, this time disguised as the role he
assumed after his breakthrough as Ziggy Stardust. He became The Thin
White Duke. He would barely survive being The Thin White Duke, due to
the Dukes fondness for those long, thin white lines.
By now it will have become clear that in this particular study we are
borrowing a fancy term from the academic-scientific world, comparative
morphology, in order to contrast the varying branches on the singersongwriting tree. Basically this means the comparison of the structure of
organisms, or songs, or their composers, in a way that draws surface similarities out and clarifies deep differences beneath. Not only can we compare,
therefore, the structure of a songwriter like Dylan to Wilson, and Mitchell to
Bowie, we can also contrast the evolving structures and emotional temperaments within each artists individual career.
Bowie is by far the performer with the most varied and outrageous career
shifts and stylistic evolutionary leaps across his 40-year reign. Yet his output
remains surprisingly consistent, both in theme and content, with many of
his newest songs having the same degree of intensity and urgency and
59
remaining as fresh as his earliest work. At the same time, he was always
celebrating entropy in the extreme.
The reason this kind of exotic application of comparative morphology
works so well, even though it is more routinely applied to biological and
botanical organisms, is that all the artists discussed here seem to have
emerged from the same historical and cultural moment, the 1960s. They all
share a certain sensibility, partly through their common absorption of varied
drugs as inspirational tools and partly through the social and political shifts
in which they all participated. They can therefore be compared as easily as
roses and orchids, as long as we keep track of their core relationships to the
popular culture we all inhabit.
In the case of a remarkable, and a remarkably alien, talent such as Bowie,
we can trace the trajectory of his personal evolution as an artist by gauging
the emotions in his songs. Songs which, no matter how strange they might
appear on the surface, have the identical degree of merger between autobiographical and social energies as the songs of his songwriting peers who also
allow us to use them as our mirror. The self-portraits Bowie paints for us,
however, have a peculiar charm and subterranean weirdness that keeps them
constantly fresh long after his nervous shadow has left the public stage.
His songs continue to mesmerize us partly because he continues to concoct
new roles with which to deliver them. Perhaps he was aided in this theatrical
versatility at a very young age when he studied with the famed experimental
mime, Lindsay Kemp, who showed him the proper way to wear a mask,
whether it was visible or not. I taught David in expressionistic and exotic
theatre, especially Kabuki. I taught him how to perform, how to project,
how to enchant, and how to hypnotize the public when you step on stage.11
Bowie learned his early lessons well, donning a succession of captivating
personas in order to elude the chief nemesis of all pop stars, time itself. From
Space Oddity, a marvelous memorial to the period from 1969, which capitalized on the Stanley Kubrick film of the same year, to The Man Who Sold the
World, modifying the title of a Robert Heinlein science fiction story, to Hunky
Dory, his coming-out record, and to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, his
breakthrough record, Bowie was The Alien.
From Aladdin Sane, wearing its debauchery like a badge of honor, to
Diamond Dogs, Young Americans, and Station to Station, he charted pure
Orwellian dread, harshly observing the meltdown of the very social system
he was engaging in melting downhe was The Decadent, warning us of his
own arrival.
But Bowie finally came into his own during what Mojo Magazine once
called his art decade, creating three masterpieces with Brian Eno as
producer/collaborator in Berlin. The sparkling creation of The Low Trilogy,
for which he will always be best remembered, or should be, consisted of
Low from 1976, and then Heroes and The Lodger. Eno rescued Bowie from
himself, from his addictions, from his excesses, and from the potential bankruptcy of his musical ideas.
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Since then Bowie has pulled back from the brink, made shining dance
music from hell, and somehow survived long enough to marry a supermodel
and father some kids, a shocking turnaround for the ultimate role player.
Or perhaps, just another role.
The song Time from Aladdin Sane, has always struck me as being the
quintessential way into the wicked world of David Bowie. Time is characterized here as a passive, implacable, and at times even crazy witness. In order
to escape from our strange bondage we may find some temporary solace, in
drugs, in people, in sleep, but in that solace were not actually conquering
time. The escape isnt even real, because the bondage is also, in a way, imaginary. Thus Bowie moves on to dreams. Throughout the artists own dreams,
his love remained kind. But love also does something strange. Love has
left you dreamless, he asserts. And although he can imagine smiles in this
darkness, he concludes, All I have to give is guilt for dreaming.
All Bowie has to give us is guilt for dreaming. Well, thats the way in;
finding your way out is up to you.
5
The Risk Taker:
Marianne Faithfull
Falling from Grace
Never feel secure with the woman you love, for there are more dangers in a
womans nature than you imagine.1
Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch
If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, Im not sure who it might be.

Marianne Faithfull is sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen,
sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one
of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally
performed with the Velvet Underground but who left them because they
were probably too happy for her.
Marianne Faithfull is the dark side of Joni Mitchell. While its true that
Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull is the dark side of Jonis dark side.
She is an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from
its frontier took on the documentary status of legend. She is an empath with
a remarkable ability for turning survival into a religion.
John Cage once remarked that, rather than being a musician and making
music, what he was actually interested in was measuring soundsphonometry, he called it. In the same way, Faithfull is most concerned with measuring
the weight of certain emotions in her songs. Perhaps we could call it
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empathometry: the ability to calculate the exchange value between emotions

and ideas, between suffering and salvation.
Naturally, all artists, perhaps especially singer-songwriters, would admit to
being slaves to risk. They accept creative and often even personal risk as one
of the prices they pay to do the job at hand. But in Faithfull we have the ideal
example of something truly scary, a person who will take the ultimate risks
for everyone, on our behalf, and go to the very end of where that risk takes
her. Well, almost to the end.
Once one knows a little of her genealogy, perhaps the embrace of risk
both artistic and existentialin Faithfulls work and life becomes a little more
clear. Her mother Eva was the Baroness Erisso, hailing from a long line of
Austro-Hungarian aristocrats, the Von Sacher-Masochs. If the name rings a
bell, its probably because of one particularly famous, or infamous, member
of the clan. Her great uncle was Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel
Venus in Furs (1870), gave rise to the familiar term masochism. What a lovely
and inspiring family legacy!
Her immediate roots are no less dramatic. Her mother had been raped by
occupying Russian soldiers, becume pregnant, and had an abortion, then
met Major Glynn Faithfull, a British spy working behind allied lines. In a clear
bid to escape her situation, Eva married the Major and fled from her
distressed background. They split up fairly quickly, but not until establishing
an eccentric household that would forever mark their daughter Marianne
with the radical urges that eventually guided her own lifestyle choices.
And what choices she made, almost as if driven by a kind of family karma
that all but guaranteed her leap into the abyss that followed. It took almost
30 years to get the Glimmer Twins of The Rolling Stones to admit that it was
Faithfull who wrote their iconic little ode Sister Morphine, which rose to
fame on The Stones 1971 album Sticky Fingers, with their names, Jagger and
Richards, listed as the composers, not Faithfulls.
Even though Faithfull released her own version of the song in 1968, it went
nowhere largely because the public who had swooned to the lithe blonde
singing As Tears Go By refused to sanction that same little angels descent
into the darkness of drug addictionsomething that was far more acceptable
in the macho boys club of rock music. Her version is the more harrowing
one. The scream of the ambulance was coming for her, personally.
But she would exact some creative redemption when she finally released
her very own masterpiece in 1979, Broken English, a record that clearly
revealed her own prowess for powerful poetry and the dance of decadent
doom. Her version of Lennons Working Class Hero alone is worth the
price of admission, with that strange other worldly combination of a purring
growl and a cracking cackle that made her ravaged voice so distinctive.
By the time she penned Broken English, the times were far more favorable
for her particular pathology as it played out in gritty, hard-edged songs that
could never be confused with the soft pop of her swinging London origins.
Even though As Tears Go By, performed when she was 17, was a bleak
The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull
63
and monotone lament, it didnt approximate the descent into darkness represented by her comeback record, which placed her in the forefront of serious
singer-songwriters, and so far away from her beginnings as a gentle pop tart.
For a while though, Faithfull was our counterculture Lolita, trying out each of
The Stones in turn before eventually settling on Jagger.
By the late 70s, punk music was creating an angry answer to pops and
rocks massive commercialism, and it was this chilly climate upon which
Faithfull was able to capitalize for her return to the spotlight after a decade
of heroin addictionfrom which she only barely survived. Faithfull was
definitely the original material girlthere would likely be no Madonna if
not for herand there is simply no useful comparison between Faithfulls
strong plunge into feminist rock and the 80s dance queens solipsistic
provocations.
But back in 1968 when the original version of Faithfulls Sister Morphine
was written and it tumbled onto an unsuspecting audience, one perhaps
more used to expecting more blondeness in her music (of the what the world
needs now variety), the radio waves recoiled from her message of selfdestruction and oblivion. Though a few years later, when the song was sung
by Jagger, audiences lapped it up. Why those reactions were not surprising
is in the lyrics: Sister Morphine, you better make up my bed, cause you
know and I know in the morning Ill be dead.
Faithfull wasnt, of course, and the real shocker is that she had yet to fully
taste the oblivion she craved when she wrote that song. Once or twice was
all she tried the drug, testing it out for size. It was far more a romantic evocation of the condition from the outside, poetically projected through the rock
environment that she inhabited with her main consorts, The Rolling Stones.
I was delighted to discover the following quote from her autobiography,
Faithfull, written with David Dalton, which seems to secure her position
among the boys rock club and also solidify her membership in the wider
union of sufferers.
Sister Morphine was released in England in February 1969. It was out for a
mere two days when Decca freaked out and unceremoniously yanked it off
the shelves. There was no explanation, no apology. When it came out on Sticky
Fingers two years later however, there wasnt a peep about it, so perhaps it was
the timing. I wasnt being allowed to break out of my ridiculous image. I was
being told that I would not be permitted to leave that wretched, tawdry doll
behind. If I went on doing my nice little folksy songs, I could go on making
records.2
Furthermore, and most importantly for our purposes here, Faithfull writes
a descriptive phrase that was alarmingly synchronistic and one which I had
not encountered before starting this book, Sister Morphine was my
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Frankenstein, my self-portrait in a dark mirror. But unlike Marys, my creation wasnt going to be allowed to see the light of day. Mine was a very pop
Frankenstein, just a song, but in my mind I had painted a miniature gothic
masterpiece, my celebration of death!3
She would exact a profound revenge, of course, with the ascent of her
comeback in 1979. Broken English was her full-on twisted testament, and it
revealed her to be a remarkable singer-songwriter with the potential to
plunge just as deeply as could the rock boys club into the darkness and
denial of the dank drug dream.
Perhaps there was something after all in her constitutional makeup, something almost genetic and hereditary, stemming from both her strange childhood with extremely strange parents in a dysfunctional home, and the notso-distant echo of her mothers great uncle, the man for whom masochism
is officially named. For what else was her self-abnegation and near obliteration at the hands of the poppy but an extended and hopeless attempt to
engage in a kind of transcendental masochistic philosophy, one from which
she is lucky to have emerged at all?
So it is that Marianne Faithfull unwittingly provides the ideal template for

all of the artists under consideration here, for she, like they all do, creates a
self-portrait in a dark mirror. But when we gaze into it by listening to her words
(and all of their works), we somehow manage to see ourselves reflected there.
We seem to see our entire society pictured in the shadowy visions of these
talented but troubled troubadours.
It now seems entirely possible, given the presence of Sacher-Masoch blood
in her blonde veins, that Faithfulls background made her emotionally predisposed to submit to perhaps the greatest and most dangerous of sadists, King
Heroin. Naturally enough, His Satantic Majesty also had close ties with quite
a few of Mariannes peers in this edgy profession.
But in Broken English she wasnt just exploring the scary side of her own
pathology, a prerequisite for all dark mirrors everywhere; she also was
personifying the dysfunctions of the late capitalist and postindustrial society.
And in that husky (its too frightening a voice to call sultry after all) Marlene
Dietrich growl of hers, Faithfull enunciates the questions we all want asked,
even if answers will never be forthcoming: Could have come through anytime, cold lonely puritan, what are you fighting for?
This leads us to the all-important question of that voice. That voice which at
first seems it couldnt possibly belong to a singer-songwriter who wants us to
listen, and yet it has a seductive power that makes it impossible not to listen.
This uncommonly odd singing style is something Faithfull shares with all of
her peers under study here: each has a unique style we would never expect
to succeed and yet one that transcends all of our conventional expectations.
These voices simply force us to listen with different ears.
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Only Mariannes is the kind of voice that could adequately deliver such
incisive lyrics as those found in the harrowing songs on Broken English. Only
a voice like hers would be chosen by thoughts like hers in order to be brought
up into the light.
In Guilt, for instance, she feels guilt, she sings, though she simultaneously
proclaims her own innocence. She hasnt lied to her lover, she hasnt committed murder, but she feels a powerful guilt. Im like a curious child, she sings,
and concludes with her complicating request, give me more, more, more,
more, more, more, more. After all, are you really sure youve done no wrong?
In The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, an agonizing lament about a sheltered life
that suddenly swings into fantasy overdrive, Lucy wakes up one morning in
her whitewashed home and town, and dreams there of fantastic lovers: till
the world turned to orange and the room went spinning round. At 37 she
realized her cosmopolitan dreams were false hopes, and so instead she finds
her solace in an idealized past and a fantastical (and false) future. In the
meantime, the phone rings away, hinting at reality, but not so forcefully that
she cant dream on.
In Why Dya Do It?one of the most vitriolic responses to betrayal that
I think anyone has ever had the nerve to commit to record (where it is memorialized forevermore)she concludes with the appropriately memorable
aint nothing to laugh, you just tore our kisses right in half.
But she saved her most harrowing vocal performance for one of the most
astonishing interpretations of another songwriters words ever delivered
in Lennons Working Class Hero. When the once wispy Faithfull begins to
declaim in one of Lennons most biting self-vivisections as soon as youre
born they make you feel small, she manages to convey the blood in the
words even more than the words themselves. We feel that she too is a working class hero, when in reality she was really quite favored by the godsthe
gods of the counterculture and underworld. She was, after all, descended
from aristocracy, even though it was the Aristocracy of Pain. But it was so
compassionate of her to let us share all that pain with her, and as an empath,
to make us feel the same pain ourselves in our own lives, somewhere, sometime. The guitar that accompanies those words is equally unnerving, a slow
bass pulse simulating the doomed dance of the working class ascent.
Marianne Faithfull was the only other artist capable of fully capturing and
conveying Lennons tortured insights. And she did so on a record that was
every bit as tortured and stripped down as Lennons own radical departure
from being typecast, 1970s Plastic Ono Band, his first truly solo record
(without either The Beatles or Ono in collaboration), and the one with perhaps his most terrifyingly primal indictments of his former life.
From the very beginning, Faithfulls roots in the cultural avant-garde of her
time were well established. Her first lover was John Dunbar, a near mythical
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figure in London who ran the Indica Gallery co-owned by Barry Miles, where
John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at one of her conceptual art shows. With
money from Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon fame, and also crucial financial
support from a young Paul McCartney, the gallery began to form the locus of
a scene.
This was 1963, after all, and London had not yet begun to swing. Faithfull
and the others were among the new tribal forces of youth that started the
pendulum moving. As she herself once put it, The threads of a dozen little
scenes were invisibly twining together.
Who knew then that the big stew of a scene would eventually turn global in
its scope, liberating whoever wanted to be liberated, whether they were
young or old.
We said, right this is our mission. Free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen,
Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customized existentialism, hedonism and rock n roll.
And lo and behold, before long there was a definite buzz going on.4 Faithfulls
own words are the best way to the center of what that buzz was all about. Hers is
the best commentary on the sultry blonde myth that surrounded her, especially
because she herself knows precisely how much of it all was myth.
According to Pop Mythology my life proper began at Adrienne Postas
launching party in March 1964, for it was there that I first met Mick Jagger.
Mick fell in love with me on the spot (or so the story goes), decided I was
fit to be his consort, and wrote As Tears Go By. I, on the other hand,
immediately began shooting heroin and having a lot of sex.5
In reality, of course, even though there was precious little of it to speak of,
Faithfulls persona was the construction of The Stones hyper-kinetic manager,
Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw in her the ideal female reflection of the
times. Oddly enough, I recently watched a concert performance of one of
the current queens of rough pop, Avril Lavigne, and was stunned to see that
the persona is still in full flight 40 years later, right down to the incredibly
straight blonde hair and monotone singing style.
I was never that crazy about As Tears Go By, Faithfull wrote.
God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from. The image
that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott, looking into the mirror
and watching life go by. Its an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of
twenty to have written, a song about a woman looking back nostalgically
on her life.6
It was even more astonishing for a girl of 17 to be chosen to sing the dark
little ode. By the time she was fully in the grip of her heroin addiction, which
was almost immediately thereafter, the resonance of the song would be far
more ironic. Only Marianne Faithfull could have performed the song on stage
a few years later with David Bowie (in 1973). She was wearing a catholic
nuns outfit (get it, she had a habit?). By then, the tears really were going by,
and going dry.
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Yet the song so associated with her was not by herthat would come later,
in lyrics that were more searing and sodden than anything even The Glimmer
Twins could cook up. Faithfull stated,
As Tears Go By was a marketable portrait of me, and as such is an ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons. It did
such a good job of imprinting that it was to become, alas, an indelible part
of my media-conjured self for the next fifteen years. I re-recorded it at the
age of forty, and at that moment I was exactly the right age and in the right
frame of mind to sing it. It was then that I truly experienced the lyrical
melancholy of the song for the first time.7
Soon she would be plumbing the depths of her own pathology in order to
project songs with such intense melancholy that they made As Tears Go
By seem like a Disney jingle. And all this despite the fact that she hated
performing and had a serious dread of personal exposure: The nightly
ordeal. Getting on stage in front of hundreds of hostile teenagers who had
not come to see me but Freddy and The Dreamers or The Merseybeats.
I was absolutely petrified. Still am. But I soon learned to make paralysis part
of my performance.8 Indeed, that is one of the strange features we loved
so much about her, the fact that she was different with a capital D. She
remembered:
The dolly girls all jiggled and jumped up and down and shook their moneymakers, doing little go-go steps in their thigh length white boots. I didnt
want to compete with that, so I decided to go as far as I could in the other
direction. I simply stood in front of the microphone, very still, my hands
dangling by my side and sang from some place deep inside me, and out
came this clear, ethereal voice. It wasnt the least sexy or hip. It was about
as far as you could get from sexy.9
Oh, but it was sexy, precisely because she wasnt trying. It was unbearable,
in fact, and she soon developed a style that the dolly girls could never hope to
compete with. Im still as scared now as I was in 1964. That hasnt changed
at all. The fear is exactly the same. I would have thought that after thirty years
of this fucking game youd get over it. But you dont.10 This sort of bravery
in the face of paralyzing fear is exactly what makes her one of the best
emblems for the enigma we are exploring here.
She was trying hard not to sink into the abyss that was spread before her like
a banquet, a beggars banquet, it should be specified, but her own appetite for
oblivion, shared by so many other dark mirrors, doomed her from the start.
I vowed to myself that I was going to be good. Marry John, have my baby,
stop going from man to man. I desperately wanted to escape this random
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life. But whatever arranges human destiny apparently cared little for my
plans, because on April 26, 1965, God Himself checked into the Savoy Hotel.
Bob Dylan came to town wearing Phil Spector shades and an aureole of hair
and seething irony. Dylan was, at that moment in time, nothing less than the
hippest person on earth.
I wasnt simply a fan, I worshipped him. I was aware that the tribute traditionally laid at the feet of pop stars by their female fans was sex. I was incredibly ambivalent. I never saw Dylans malicious side, nor the lethal wit that
has often been ascribed to him. I never thought of him as amusingly cruel
the way I thought of John Lennon. Dylan was simply the mercurial,
bemused centre of the storm, vulnerable and almost waiflike. Within a
matter of days, I had been elevated to Chief Prospective Consort. I was the
chosen one, the sacrificial virgin.11
Once you start at the top, where else is there to go but down? In Faithfulls
case, down into the arms of the ultimate lover, albeit a pharmaceutical one,
into the quivering arms of both cocaine and heroin, both cruel and unforgiving lovers who would erase the next decade of her life, and almost erase her
life itself.
Her fall from grace appeared to be sudden but was actually a long time in
coming, since she herself has admitted that she consciously chose a direct
route to oblivion. In Falling From Grace, a song on the album she made
after a decade of hard living beyond what the average imagination can
summon, A Childs Adventure, she enunciates her karma from the vantage of
1983, long, long after the 60s dream had soured: Feeling haunted, Im lying
low.. . .Put yourself in my place.
Put ourselves in her place? Well, well try. In Dangerous Acquaintances
(1981), perhaps the most aptly titled record imaginable for her, she was also
asking her perennial question, this time titled Truth Bitter Truth: Where
did it go, my youth?
Naturally, her youth slipped way into the same place all of ours did, down
the drain of time; but she, unlike the rest of us, sped up the process through
her own lifestyle choices. One of those choices included her telling all of us
her own bitter truth.
Still one of her best recordings, A Childs Adventure pursued a personal
demon that somehow manages to indict all of our shared cultural compulsions from the magic time she represents for all of us. She readily admits to
being the icon for our urges, though she simultaneously laments ever having
been caught up in the glare of those cultural headlights.
In Blue Millionaire from the same record, she seems to project her own
raw and wounded persona into the dazed materialism of the 80s, perhaps
amazed that shes still alive to do her job. Shes unable to present a happy face
to the world because, in her words, I am lost in the body, the passion
of time.
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Like the true dark mirror she is, Faithfull is almost wistful about what we
all watched her go through. There are a lot of things I could have done at
the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick
Jaggers inamorata, she lamented. In the end, it doesnt matter that hearts
got broken and we sweated blood. Maybe the most you can expect from a
relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.12
A few good songs, stretched out over some 60 albums and hundreds of searing songs, from the pen of a songwriter who will remain important before,
during, and after Madonnas illusory reign.
Faithfull is insistently incisive about how it felt growing up under our gaze.
The Baronesss Daughter, Pop Star Angel, Rock Stars Girlfriend . . .even
after the brutal bashing Id given them, these demon dolls of myself would
not go away. You couldnt just shed them by cutting off your hair or getting
fat. Even getting arrested or becoming a junkie on the street didnt do it.
Those things didnt change the image, they just modified it. I was now the
tarnished Pop Star Angel.. . .By the mid-seventies I had reluctantly come to
the conclusion that if I were ever to obliterate my past, Id have to create
my own Frankenstein, and then become the creature as well.13
And thats exactly what she did. She consciously descended down deeper
into the darkest part of her own darkness on a sad search for the tiny light
hidden there. The light that only certain singer-songwriters even know about,
much less care to search for.
A Sixties icon sheds her past was the way the editors of Mojo Magazine
characterized her triumphant travails. Her 1979 release of Broken English, still
her strongest with the possible exception of The Seven Deadly Sins, in which
she interpreted Kurt Weill, was not so much a comeback as a breakthrough.
She never returned from anywhere, as evidenced by her relatively recent
performance in William Burroughss theatre piece The Black Rider with Tom
Waits and Robert Wilson, since she is always a permanent risk taker, a legitimate part of the legitimate avant-garde. She didnt come back; she just
continually broke through to her next incarnation.
After cramming enough living into the 60s to last any normal lifetime,
Marianne Faithfull effectively retired for the first half of the 70sthough its
probably more accurate to say that her drug habit retired her, the editors of
Mojo Magazine reported. The publics preconceived image of me has always
been a thorny problem, she says.. . .Marianne had been to hell and back, and
knew the value of life. Broken English has the songs to prove it.14
For the details on her journey to and from the inferno, I highly recommend
reading her autobiography, Faithfull. In it she reports how it feels to no longer
be what the late great Warren Zevon once called a travel agent for death.
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I was as zealous as a convert to a new religion, poring over the old Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book as lovingly as any monk. One of my favourite
passages is Step Two, which is about the savages. Thats very much what
being an addict and an alcoholic is all about. You go back to a completely
savage state. But once out of that feral stage one is not, alas, automatically
cast into a state of grace: just being clean does not transform everything.
Indeed, it is precisely the everything of life that is pretty much the same.15
She also describes telling old friends about how ecstatic it was to be clean,
characterizing what had happened to her as incredible. But many seemed to
miss the old Marianne, a reaction she says was fairly typical of the rock
contingent. They liked me better on heroin. I was much more subdued and
manageable. Its very common with rock stars. They surround themselves
with beautiful and often brilliant women whom they also find extremely
threatening. One way out is for the women to get into drugs. That makes
them compliant and easier to deal with.16
When she called Keith Richards, the imperial leader of a rock clan who
probably introduced her to the poppy in the first place and with whom she
remains close friends, and told him her good newshow shed stopped
drinking and doing drugshe was, she reports, sympathetic but a little
worried. He paused for a beat and then said: Ahh Marianne! But what about
the Holy Grail?
Her answer remains unrecorded.
Like so many other creative artists and performers who survived the
summer of hope, which last year celebrated its 40th anniversary, and which
I believe should be more accurately referred to as the summer of dreams, Faithfull turned a fulsome 60 years of age.
As if fate decided it wasnt enough to have survived being Marianne Faithfull, harridan destiny gave her breast cancer in 2007, which she survived just
like everything else thrown at her. True, it did interrupt her world concert
tour, but once she was six months clear and free of the consequences, she
simply jumped back on board the old rock star express, completing the tour
like the weathered professional she is.
In a tribute for her birthday year, music columnist Alexandra Gill lauded
her as a one-time junkie aristocrat who has spent a lifetime mythologizing
the glamour of pain and said that even cancer didnt stop her Blondeness.
Faithfull would be the first to concur with every word. Thats how brave she
has always been. Gill writes, Faithfull, who now lives a relatively quiet existence between homes in Dublin and Paris with Francois Ravard, her manager
and lover of more than 13 years, admits that she was very lucky. In her alternate career as an actress, Faithfull recently starred in the Sam Garbarskidirected film, Irina Palm.17
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Having lived the life she has, it must sometimes be difficult remembering
whether something actually happened, or whether it was a role she played
in a film or one of her many remarkable stage appearances.
But the most powerful role she has ever undertaken was the one of the smoldering train wreck who became a global pop star before even growing up, and
then descended into the depths of a near hereditary self-punishment.
Her most powerful role, then, is still that of Marianne. Shes the role model
for every on-the-edge female singer-songwriter who has come along since
Faithfulls arrival on the scene 40 years ago. Dear Miss Winehouse, please
take note.
In my music performance, Im always trying to get closer to what Im
really like. Whereas with acting, Im really interested in roles that are
completely different to what Im like, Faithfull told Gill.18
Or, could it be that she has always been acting the role of singer-songwriter,
in the same way Dylan, Wilson, Bowie, and Mitchell have been acting? If that
were true, she, like them, would be a sparkling example of one of the darkest
of the dark mirrors I have ever had the pleasure of gazing into.
The more she conceals, the more she reveals, until there is nothing but a
glimmering golden glow that somehow suffuses and relieves some of the
pain. Not all of it, of course, but enough to make it all worthwhile.
6
The Rabble Rouser:
Tom Waits
Angel-Headed Hipster
For me its also a craft. Its not something that drops out of the sky. Its not something where you sit at your picture window and watch the sun glistening off the
trees and a deer walks by and whispers in your ear. Its really a craft, and its hard
work. Its just a lot of discipline, and hopefully, you get better with each project.1
Tom Waits
Way back in 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg chanted in Howl, I saw the best
minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry
fix, angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to
the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, he could easily have been
describing Tom Waits and his own literary mission. Or at least the outlaw
Waits has so often and so well portrayed.
Well, thank goodness some singer-songwriters have a sense of humor, and
after all, why shouldnt humor be allowed in music? Heres a joke that Tom
Waits told a journalist a few years ago:
Two men are sitting on a bench in Central Park, talking about their retirement. I got this new hobby, says one. I took up beekeeping.
Thats nice, says the other one.
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Yeah, I got 2000 bees in my apartment.

Two thousand, huh? Where you keep em?
Keep em in a shoebox.
A shoebox? Isnt that a little uncomfortable?
Ah, fuckem!
Oh yes, a joke, but since its a postmodern joke, it might at first be difficult to
discern the punch line. It perfectly sums up Tom Waitss role in our society
and culture. The punch line is there, of course, its inevitable, and once you
listen to enough of his music, it will become crystal clear to you. Perhaps even
a little too clear.
If Tom Waits hadnt existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.
In the swift decade that followed the 60s countercultural revolution, which
was proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be mostly a mass hallucination
perpetrated almost exclusively by The Beatles, the music world demanded an
antidote to the soured dream.
In 1977, even though it seemed like a thousand years after flower power,
punk music seemed to provide some of the outlet for the anger that resulted
from a dream deferred, and it definitely rejuvenated a bloated industry that
had too hotly embraced the polish of late stage Fleetwood Mac and The
Eagles. But the true antidotes real name was Tom Waits.
An example of the fact that our culture had given Waits license, around
1980, to plunge ever further into a soundscape of frenzied abstraction was
his remarkable interview exchange with a journalist named Ian Hislop.
During a show called Loose Talk, which ironically could have been the title
for a Waits song or album, the interviewer innocently asked Waits if he could
speak up a little. Waitss reply was, Ill speak any damn way I please!
And indeed he did. He still does.
He also wrote and sang songs any damn way he pleased. Eventually a book
would be released by the songwriter himself, called Beautiful Maladies, which
contained a multitude of lyrics for those searching for the meaning in his
mumblings. One description of the volume, presented as the poetry it
actually was, called it the ideal companion for the many listeners who had
been leaning forward and straining to hear the words hidden inside his
strange dark crooning.
Crooning? Thats a first. Yes, in a way it was crooning, but it was also
comparable to Bing Crosby on acid, after the twentieth century had eaten
away at his wholesome soul, and after his voice had been destroyed by some
unknown alien-occupying force. Waits croons even though he cant, just like
Mitchell carries a torch, even though she shouldnt.
In ancient times, the rabble rouser was a figure who got the masses, the
so-called citizens, riled up with a revolutionary fervor against the reigning
The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits
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monarchs. Today, however, the epithet applies to anyone who subscribes to

radical or raunchy behavior designed to get the party going and to anyone
who offers drastic alternatives to decorum in general, politeness in particular.
In other words, one who rouses those few remaining atavistic urges in people
until they boil over and alter their behaviors.
Tom Waits is one of those iconic postmodern singer-songwriter figures
who would not exist without the radical breakthroughs of certain predecessors
such as Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), beat poet Charles Bukowski, or
the beat writers in general, such as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, or
Allen Ginsberg. And yet Waits is nonetheless an authentic creative voice, both
poetically and literally, and one who broke new ground for the format of
personal confessionaggression and the celebration of pure decadence in song.
Of course, things are relative and one persons decadence is another
persons breakfast, but Waits has made a career out of singing the songs of his
own professed tawdry lifestyle. Its not a wholesome career, or a particularly
wholesome lifestyle, but it is certainly a wholly unified and consistent one.
Tom Waits is a genius. Let that be made clear at the outset. So if I say that he
was discovered at the aptly but ironically named Troubadour Clubs amateur
night, muttering to himself and pretending it was singing, I hope what
follows will be taken in the spirit in which it is offered.
Tom Waits is a genius; he is our Arthur Rimbaud, the nineteenth-century
savant-like poet for whom a radical disordering of the senses was the road
to both artistic and humanist freedom, and he is the closest thing we have to
the tradition of a self-immolating genius such as the West Coast poet Gregory
Corso, who rose to blinding but brief notoriety within the hallowed ranks of
The Beats literary movement, with invigorating gems such as The Happy
Birthday of Death.
Waits is a crazy tossed salad of everything most sordid and brilliant about
modern American culture. For him, the meaning of words is in the sound of
words, and in the most exemplary of surrealist sensibilities, he seems to have
taken quite literally Bob Dylans off-the-cuff explanation that if two words
sound the same then they mean the same.
Strangely enough, Waits doesnt seem to scare people quite as much as one
would expect. Except, of course, for those people whom he really does scare,
but they are not quite involved in this conversation anyway. The artist who
he most seems to channel, or even to enact a karaoke-like and career-long tribute performance to, is the mad musical painter Don Van Vliet, who didnt so
much as perform but incarnated himself through the shamanistic guise of
Captain Beefheart, performance artist.
But it was John Lennon, the tortured titan behind half of the greatest songwriting team in pop music history, who gave permission for all wounded
souls to give voice to their inner demons and desires, in a vocal style so raw
that no one, not even he, could have imagined that such a raspy and desperate sound could ever hope or dream to convey such powerful human
emotions. Permission taken and trumped.
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The Waits Avatar, Beefheart was the creator of Trout Mask Replica, perhaps the
strangest record ever made, and one made possible only through the intercession of Frank Zappa. It was Zappas manager Herb Cohen who stumbled upon
Tom Waits in the troubled Troubadour one night and must have been frozen in
his tracks. Here was a sound that flung a rusty tray of dirty dishwater into the
face of the love-song-loving public. Almost overnight, Waits became infamous
as one of Los Angeless most idiosyncratic and peculiarly pathological singersongwriters. He didnt join a scene, he was a scene, all by himself.
What makes each of the singer-songwriters in this book a dark mirror is the
shared continuum they all occupy: they each chose to embrace a private
dissonant emotional state that permits a unique kind of ugliness into their
highly personal confessions. The pathology that feeds, fuels, and inspires this
approach also serves them well, assuming they survive it. But this is ugliness
in name only, since though it avoids or abandons the traditional notions of
harmonic beauty and proportion, it also establishes an entirely new standard
for self-expressionone that allows the grittier aspects of life to be felt,
expressed, and shared, rather than hidden away under the camouflage of
lovely little ditties.
It is that shared creative uniqueness, which after all is not the relationship
between the songs or artists themselves so much as the link between their
compositions and expressions of similar emotions, which eventually coheres
into an ironic innovative community of sorts. In this community of outlaws,
Waits is perhaps the penultimate outsider, someone who occupies an amorphous yet central place in the pantheon.
Sure, his peers also accepted some of the ugliness of modern times and
channeled it, but no one did it with the sheer aplomb and frenzied fun of Waits.
He would both write about and live what Mojo Magazine editors once called
a bohemian, flophouse style, taking on the persona of a sentimental, grizzlyvoiced barfly and motel poet howling at the moon. Small Change (his third
record), sums up Waits chequered relationship with jazz and beat poetry.
The studied poetry of his previous records (Closing Time 1973, Heart of
Saturday Night 1974, and Nighthawks at the Diner 1975), and his carefully
nurtured gravelly timbrewas by now sufficiently lived-in to give this
album an entirely plausible feel, even though in 1976 this kind of music was
as idiosyncratic as his more out-there later work.2
That little passage contains one of the most prescient and telling comments
on Waitss musicthe suggestion that his music is lived-in, which is
indeed what separates him from even some of his most talented peers. They
are still imagining what something feels like, while Waits is reporting what
he knows something feels like.
One fine example of his urge to generously share pain is captured on
Waitss record Closing Time, and is titled I Hope That I Dont Fall in Love
with You. Here Waits describes a prosaic scene where music simply plays,
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without any further adjectives, where the narrator has had a drink, and
where, to make a long story short (as he does), it being late youd like some
company. Few, if any singers, would have the nerve to negotiate a sung
romantic encounter with this degree of ambivalence.
This is the kind of internal exploration that results in the most penetrating
projections, and Waits is the tempestuous template for the disgruntled lover
who always loses before he even begins to try to win.
The song Emotional Weather Report, from Nighthawks at the Diner, could
almost be the subtitle for his entire career, since what he is forever broadcasting is precisely that: an ongoing update on his state of mind over time.
By the 1980s, Waits had reached the apotheosis of his evolutionary arc
creatively, and some would say his greatest achievement was that he was still
alive at all. He has since proven himself to be not only a long-lasting talent but
also one who is head and shoulders above his competitorsthose who are
often more caught up in entertaining audiences and selling records than in
making musical history. Waits makes history first, then entertains his cultish
fans, then finally sells enough records to be commercially safe in a weird
world.
Waits is also notable for being a crucial link in the formation of an alternative California sound, or rather an alternative to the alternative. In Waiting
for the Sun, his excellent study of West Coast music and the mega-industry it
spawned, Barney Hoskyns included a delightful chapter covering Waits
called Crawling Down Cahuenga on a Broken Pair of Legs. Although on
the surface he seems correct to surmise that Waits was that rare singersongwriter who made a beeline away from the laid back confessional style,
when we dig deeper into the layers of Hoskynss thinking, Waits is actually
raising the bar on the art of the personally sung confession to unheard of
heights.
He is, after all, readily confessing to things he himself may or may not have
even done, or else he is confessing for everyone else, on our behalf. Nonetheless, it is still confession. Its just got some strange colors plastered all over it.
Waits carried his alcoholic/insomniac act to its logical culmination with the
somewhat self-indulgent double album Nighthawks at the Diner, seventy
minutes of small-hours trio jazz and gravelly Lord Buckleyisms. The album
was like an Edward Hopper painting come to life, confirming Waitss gift as
a writer but paling next to Small Change, his first real masterpiece. Here was
the same seedy milieu of strippers and Pepto-Bismol, but with the poetry
anchored by gem-like arrangements.3
But Hoskyns is forgetting that this is exactly what we all want Waits to do, to
indulge himself utterly until he gets as close to the edge of survival as possible,
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but without plunging over the precipice. For if he plunged, we wouldnt be getting any more reports from the edge, which is what we need him for the most.
We need him to sing out strangely on Heart Attack and Vine: youll
probably see someone you know on heart attack and vine.
We need him to intone the terrifying self-analysis of Saving All My Love
for You: Ill probably get arrested when Im in my grave. We need it, if
only as an antidote to the sugary love sung about by The Eagles, and we especially need it, if only because Tom himself is the one most guilty of spreading
bad rumors about himself. Thats why we love him, even against our better
judgment.
It was with Swordfishtrombones that Waits really began to hit his stride as the
barfly troubadour. The editors at Mojo Magazine reported,
In the 70s, Tom Waits vivid song world of plump-hearted street loners and
five and dime losers had earned him critical acclaim and a healthy cult
status, but there was a sense that hed taken the gruffly sentimental, seedy
lounge approach as far as it would go. It was a time of upheaval for Waits,
he had split with girlfriend Rickie Lee Jones and moved to New York, met
and married girlfriend Kathleen Brennan and was keen to break the
album-tour cycle of his existence.
He credits his new wife with not only saving his lifethere were reports
that the line between himself and the drunken, broken characters in his
songs was getting worryingly thinbut also giving him the confidence to
break with his old management and production team. His record company
passed on it, leaving Waits free to sign with Island and exploit his
new-found inspiration and sometimes official creative partnership for
another seven increasingly ambitious albums.4
Tom Waits is considered an island in this book for the same reason that both
Madonna and Michael Jackson are not: he has composed incendiary poetry
that reflects Americas dark side in songs that move us even if we dont
always understand what he is saying. Hes somewhat like Dylan in that
respect. Whereas both Madonna and Michael Jackson, while certainly catching some of the zeitgeist in their music and managing to stay on top for a very
long time, simply wrote dance music.
For songwriting purposes, at least as explored here, there are few things
dumber than dance music.
The best songs in the world, those of Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Joni Mitchell,
John Lennon, Paul Simon, or Elton John, for example, require us to be lying
flat on our backs to fully participate. They move us mentally and emotionally;
all the dancing takes place in our minds. Others produce music that merely
makes our limbs move.
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Perhaps even more importantly, Waits, along with his peers, serves us in a
special way that twitching about on a dance floor never can: he is an empath,
a being who feels what the collective feels but manages to express and articulate those feelings in a manner that makes us believe he knows us, inside out.
He is projecting our own deepest desires and fears. As we have seen and
heard clearly, to be an empath is one of the pivotal prerequisites for being
considered a dark mirror.
Even if what Waits expresses might only occur to us in our most distressing
dream states, he still qualifies as an empath, if only because he says what we
would like to say, if only we all werent so damn polite. Theyre alive, theyre
awake, while the rest of the world is asleep, he moans in 1983s Underground from Swordfishtrombones.
On the magnificent Franks Wild Years, from 1987, Waits desperately groans,
Get me to Reno. . .put my baby on the flat car, imploring the now defunct
saint of safety to help him reach yet another girlfriend stranded in the ether
of Toms mindits twisted in the most delightful way.
As a profoundly gifted and highly disturbing empath, Waits also tells us
things we dont want to know but which we know are true. The Black
Rider from 1998 (also sung by Marianne Faithfull) is a stunning collaboration between Waits, avant-garde theatre designer Robert Wilson, and the
great Waits pin-up William Burroughs. In it Waits has others speak for him
and on our behalf: Anchors away with the Black Rider, Ill drink your blood
like wine. The song promises a disturbing thrill, a morbid orgy where skin
will be shed and skeletons can dance.
Thats the only kind of dancing one can do to Waits, the kind with no skin
and lone rattling bones to keep the percussion going. He knows he is an
empath, even a pathological one, and he knows what his job is all about,
even though he has often referred to making up songs as childrens work
for which he appears to feel guilty. When asked to what extent the persona
he has created on his recordings has merged with the real Tom Waits, his
response was not just honest and telling, it was perfectly revealing as well:
You mean, am I Frank Sinatra or Jimi Hendrix? Or am I Jimi Sinatra? Its a
ventriloquist act, everybody does one.5
Actually, not everyone does it, only empathic dark mirrors can truly throw
their voices to this remarkable extent, and Waits can throw his with the best
of them. Even when he grew in maturity to the point where he was able to
collaborate, mostly with his second partner, the gifted but shy songwriting
muse, Kathleen Brennan, he still served as a conduit or channel for the unconscious urges of his own ironic-iconic personality problems. Thats why we
love him, even more than healthy people.
When asked about how such a collaboration could function beneath the
blinding heat of his own identity, he gives an answer that is so simple it
approximates a profound insight: Oh, you know, one person holds the nail
and the other one swings the hammer. Such an insight may well have helped
some of the collaborating partnerships, known as continents in this study, to
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survive longer than they did. If they had only been able to take turns holding
the nail and swinging the hammer.
The trouble with those equally talented partnering continents is their built-in
misery over not functioning more freely as islands, a misery to which well turn
to in Part Two of this book. In the meantime, we have Waits to remind us what it
means to be so solipsistic that the world appears to exist as a mere toolbox for
your songs. In the case of 2006s Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Waits
sings, like so many of his fellow artists, about a profound uncertainty that only
ceases at the point where he considers just how lost he issomething he is
utterly convinced of. This exquisite expression comes from his alleged location
at the bottom of the world. There he finds himself fixed to mythical types
(the bishop and the barbershop liar) and flows into divine substances
and poetic flights. But upon awakening he finds himself, strangely, in the company of a cardinal bird, and when I wanna talk he hangs on every word.
Its as if Charles Bukowski went on a blind date with Bob Dylan, chaperoned by Captain Beefheart.
It also brings to mind an even more exotic reference and comparison, but one
that makes perfect sense in the skewed world of Waits. The Nobel-prizewinning poet Czeslaw Milosz wrote about reading the ancient Japanese poet
Issa, master of haiku: In this world, we walk on the roof of hell, gazing at flowers.. . .To know and not to speak, in that way one forgets. What is pronounced
strengthens itself. What is not pronounced tends to non-existence.
This is simply Waits all over. He insists on pronouncing what is often difficult for us to hear, but he does it so damn well and keeps it contained in a
crisp musicality so damn intelligent that we readily travel with him, down
to the bottom of the world. He has that rare gift of the metaphysical poets of
the distant past, the gift for experiencing thought as feeling and feeling as
thought. Which is why we return to him, again and again, for his intensely
alluring emotional weather reports.
7
The Anger Manager:
Elvis Costello
Every Day I Write the Book
The words that are being spoken are serious, whether you take them at face value
or listen to them at all. . .Im not a preacher, Im a singer. I can sing about serious
things, but I dont think I have to put on a pious face to do it.1
Elvis Costello
Well I used to be disgusted but now I try to be amused, Elvis the Second
once squeaked.
Who would ever have expected that to be his trajectory, from angry disgust
to detached amusement? Then again, who would have expected such an
angry rock presence, born out of the powerful fumes of punk and new wave,
to have settled down as a dad to create a family with Diana Krall, not exactly
the kind of songstress one would at first imagine him breeding with.
Elvis Costello was in charge of anger throughout most of the 1970s.
He seemed to be single-handedly channeling the disappointment and disillusionment with the end of the preceding dreamy decade, and his music fed a
growing appetite for dissatisfaction with dreams in general and utopias in
particular.
From all accounts, Declan McManus is not a very nice person. And Elvis
Costello, McManuss alias created by a manager (in a manner not unlike the
way Colonel Tom Parker fashioned Elvis and Brian Epstein designed
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The Beatles), is not really that much nicer. Just better knownand certainly
more recognizable than the sullen sulk who first came to prominence by highlighting everything that rock n roll wasnt and rebelling against an industry
that had become too fat and wealthy.
His was the second generation, the reiteration of rocks initial precepts to
both an aging and a new audience, and his was the generation, along with
Waits and others, that allowed despair and disappointment to be the credo
for their creativity. It became, in fact, both their raw material and their modus
operandi, and this abstract despair was a palpable disappointment that
The Sixties didnt really work, or at least not quite the way so many gifted
artists had told us they would. We believed those guys.
In the dark imagination of Declan McManus, it rapidly became clear that
the 70s or 80s probably wouldnt work either. Thus the artistic achievements
of Costello and Waits were both inextricably linked to that broader, wider,
and much deeper sense of derailed despair that fueled the twentieth century
itself in so many ways. This included ways that permitted unexpected
amounts of dissonance and the acceptance of and representation of ugliness
as well as beauty as the proper purview of the true twentieth-century artist,
and singer-songwriters were included in that open invitation to modernist
experimentation.
It was Declan McManuss and Elvis Costellos manager, Jake Riviera,
which also sounds like a made-up name, who not only bestowed the new
name but also choreographed the outfit, hairstyle, glasses, and entire gait.
In fact, Riviera crafted the perfect anti-Beatle for the times, for a generation
feeling disdain and in despair from the dream being over. After all, Lennon
said it was. Rivieras design for the Elvis Costello mask was a somewhat spastic look in keeping with the anger and right-wing pressures of the times, soulfully dragging out the demise of the Wests prominence on the world stage.
It was during the disillusioned decades immediately following the dreams
end that the snarling ferocity of the Costello character declaimed his disappointments in the same tone of defiance as that used by the Dylan character
created by Robert Zimmerman. The synchronicity of the dark mirror in action.
All this artifice and stagecraft is a monument to irony, of course, considering how important authenticity and truth seem to be to this angry artist.
But it is only the first of many such ironies and paradoxes that abound in
the character of one of the first commercially successful musical artists to seriously bite the hands that fed him so well. Others had nibbled slightly;
Costello chomped down with gusto.
We see the late flowering of the same modernist dissonance that first found
expression in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Varese and Cage, but wrapped in
the subversive packaging of a four-minute songthis is rock musics version
of an abstract experiment with the songwriting tradition.
In fact, both jazz and rock n roll, the two quintessentially great American
inventions in musical history, were rogue mutant forms arising from a strong
anti-classical impulse in a country that loved to invent new things, since the
The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello
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country itself was first imagined and then built. Few inventions rival rock
music for sheer dissonant glee. By rock music, for the purposes of the present
surveys scope, we mean the music that evolved out of rock n roll from about
19642004.
In a way then, its not surprising that America would embrace fabricated
figures, as far back as Samuel Clemens becoming Mark Twain, or Robert
Zimmerman becoming Bob Dylan, or Don Van Vliet becoming Captain
Beefheart, or even a raving Brit becoming a prickly persona called Elvis Costello.
As Larry David Smith pointed out so astutely in his study of the torch-song
tradition, unlike Dylan, McManus felt no particular urge or need to provide
us with a back story to this new persona. That would have been old fashioned. And in the infernal postmodern angst factory where McManus toiled,
it might have reeked of servitude.
When Robert Zimmerman invented Bob Dylan, he devised elaborate
accounts of Dylans life. The imaginative youngster concocted wild tales
about his characters parents, travels, musical influences and famous affiliations. Dylan knew no boundaries as he shared his inventions with
friends, lovers, and of course, journalists.
When Declan McManus (and Jake Riviera, whose name it turns out was
also somehow concocted, imaginatively, from Andrew Jakeman) invented
Elvis Costello, McManus not only refused to devise a personal history,
he aggressively resented any inquiries into anything. Costello briskly
resisted any discussion of musical influence, deftly avoided any talk of his
youth, and fiercely attacked interviewers whenever possiblethat is when
he bothered to talk to reporters. We have then, two invented celebrity
characters employing two distinct publicity strategies.2
McManus left the mask an utter blank, and wore it peevishly, as if we somehow were responsible for his chagrins. But then, perhaps that has something
to do with the significance of the year 1977 and the dynasty of despair that
was about to overtake the recording industry itself. A dynasty resulting in
both big money and massive melancholy.
He was a ready-made myth, practically a Duchampian rock star. Whereas

Dylan camouflaged his anger with metaphor, Costello stripped his rage of
any clothing whatsoever, a prime indicator that his discomfort was a cultural
and collective wave of disillusionment and disappointment. There was no
longer any reason for pretending or entertaining, his actions and his act
almost seemed to implyeverything has gone wrong and we all know it.
He therefore didnt dilute his venom in lyrics either, since the times in
which he matured as an artist no longer required it, having entered the real
live and actual king midas in reverse phase of our pop history. The times
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themselves, a mere decade after the summer of dreams, had transformed the
job of the singer-songwriter from one of inspiration to one of consolation.
If you could call Declans declamations, as sung by Costello, consoling at
all, you could also call Louis Ferdinand Celines Journey to the End of the
Night consoling. . .to the damned, perhaps.
The year 1977 was paradoxical musically for many reasons. Some called it
the summer of hate. Thats stretching it a bit, since in the same year both
punk and Fleetwood Macs Rumours hit the air, but there was a definite
cynicism to both late Fleetwood Mac and punk, ironically enough. Punk
because the music industry turned out to be just another industry after all,
and Mac because if that was true, well then, we might as well cash in and
buy the lear jet. Right?
It somehow seemed like 100 years later than 1967, not a mere 10, and the
cultural landscape was being irrevocably altered. The violent rush of punk
music, a vital antidote to rocks perceived sellout, was permitting talentless
louts to roam the stage spitting disgust back out at the audience. Talk about
dark mirrors, theirs were drenched in distaste.
The Sex Pistols, even though they couldnt really play music, were important because they could play rage. The Clash, who could play very fine music,
were important as a countermeasure to the saturation of sweetness and love
that had preceded them in time.
Fleetwood Mac, having started as a brilliant British psychedelic blues band
under Peter Green in 1967, before morphing into a gently experimental
progressive rock band under Bob Welch in 1971, had finally evolved under
Lindsey Buckingham into one of the most perfectly produced pop music
ensembles in history. They found the pulse of the times in a spookily prescient way by celebrating their own dysfunctions and making us forget ours
by wallowing with them. Their finger has never left that pulse: 2008 is the
40th anniversary of their long strange trip.
Thus 1977 was a schizophrenic year indeed. On the one hand we had a blockbuster like Rumours being listened to by nearly ever pair of ears on the planet.
On the other, we had the death of Elvis Presley in seedy circumstances befitting
his own vast fall from early sparkling greatness to later somber weightness.
And somewhere in between, we had the birth of a new kind of Elvis, a
name chosen by McManuss mentor, his very own Parker/Epstein in order
to, as he put it, command the musical worlds attention. Amazingly, as fate
would have it, he was young and just hungry enough to go along with this
creative charade. Chance is the fools name for fate.
His first record, My Aim Is True, even had a small line hidden in its checkerboard background reading elvis is king. Yes, but which Elvis? The one who
just died, or the one who was just born in such a blaze of anti-commercial grandeur? The Costello character was drenched in irony in the same way the Dylan
character had been drenched in sincerity. This was troubling.
Concealing ones identity during or through writing, to lie in order to
protect either us or oneself, has to be one of the oldest of old literary
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traditions. Indeed, our tradition is largely a set of variations on to what

degree that observation is true.
In the case of utterly concocted characters who act out their songs as if
presenting someone elses sentiments, such as the supreme exemplar of
Zimmermans Dylan character, and not far behind, McManuss Costello character, we can see and hear the risky strategies of singer-songwriters who hide
their faces behind a multitude of masks, perhaps in order to say with greater
honesty, greater vigor, or even greater venom, what they think needs to be
said. Declan even had the cheeky audacity to cloak himself in the name of
the king of rock n roll! This is artifice declaring itself to be such, in broad
daylight.
Not surprisingly, such artists are under the intense sway of a central dictum
that moderates and modulates all great songwriting efforts, as formulated
once so well by Stephen Holden: if you dare to sing of truth you cant avoid
some pain. But our dark mirrors are addicted to the truth; every single one
of them lives the melancholy life of the gifted poetic observer who must
contend with a world largely controlled by the untrue and unreasonable.
Thus the pain becomes, potentially at least, a prerequisite to poetry, or so it
appears in the best of cases: Dylan, Wilson, Mitchell, Bowie, Faithfull, Waits,
and Costello.
Sounds like a law firm from hell. And it just might be. Great singing
of great songs composed by the singer is definitely the same as great acting,
as evidenced so clearly by these multifarious stage personas. Theirs is a
dark but elegant poetry, stemming from a lidless lifestyle, like so many of
our finest singer-songwriters. Or at least those that manage to survive
themselves.
The artist known as Elvis Costello started at the top of his game, with his
first record, My Aim Is True, containing a fully formed and mature talent just
dripping with ironic disdain. From there he merely perfected an already incisive and intensely creative stance, one capable of sustaining the full range of
rage-soaked feelings. It was a veritable shock and awe campaign aimed at
the complacency of both British culture in general and what he perceived as
a bloated music industry in particular.
Welcome to the Working Week celebrates the quotidian existence of
commuting labor forces with a sense of perfect authenticity, largely because
Costello was just then working several simultaneous computer programmer
jobs to support a family. It always amazes me that even the most unconventionally gifted artists want to also have a normal existence, to have a family
and be a parent, even though their primary urges are all allied against such
a venture. Bless them, I guess.
The working week is infused with apathy, and there is even a subtle
danger in Costellos song. Theres a chance of utter annihilation here, but
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even more pressingly, theres the surprise engendered by the fact that it
doesnt happen more quickly. In fact, surprise runs through the song. Thus
Costello asks why anyone would want to befriend him, since he feels himself
to be like a juggler running out of hands.
The same dim assessments are cast over the constant subject of loves labor
lost, as in No Dancing, which closes with the repeated refrain Theres
gonna be no dancing when they get home.
One instantly senses that the dancing he is referring to is the same unique
kind celebrated in a later song, Mystery Dance, the horizontal kind, in
which that songs character declares that he cant do it anymore and Im
not satisfied, I cant do it anymore and Im not satisfied, I cant do it anymore
and Im not satisfied.
In Blame It on Cain, the kind of blanket blame that ravages all human
frailty is suspended before our eyes by the songs protagonist. Between
repeated requests that we do as the song title directs, and not blame the
narrator, he remarks on his own isolation, which hes afraid is driving him
to a kind of madness. This is complicated by the idea of blame, beautifully
expressed in the lament that its nobodys fault, but we need somebody to
burn. The need for this somebody is at the heart of this piece, if in a somewhat abstract way, and its in following this thought back to the initial point
of transgression that Costello makes one of his most interesting pointsthat
one of the things most worthy of this blame is his own voice, which has been
too self-involved and too self-contained.
Its one of those rare occasions when a singer-songwriter allows him- or
herself to share some of the angst-ridden challenges of talking to oneself
too much, which is, after all, the ultimate description of making a great song
in the first place. Feeling too much, thinking too much, talking too much, and
finally singing out, just the right amount for all of us to identify the shimmering images as our own reflections. Describing it in those terms makes it
appear almost as odd and magical as it really is in fact.
Few musical artists are as cranky, both in their work and in their management of public persona and image, as this Elvis Costello construction.
Perhaps only Van Morrison has him beat when it comes to being notoriously
difficult and prickly. Perhaps its the shared Irish Catholic childhood background that does it, who knows? But that sharp edge was evident in Elvis
from the start, fully fleshed out as a career strategy, and, one senses, a sensitive but angry young mans only reliable survival mechanism.
In Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver), Costello pronounces the full
measure of doubt, suspicion, and romantic skepticism that has become the
creative hallmark of everything he does so well. And nowhere is this more
apparent than in his declaration that imagination is at her most dangerous
when you try to believe her just a little too much.
In Cheap Reward, the joys of requited love are further explored for
their pain-inducing potential. At one point Costello asks his lover how
she could ever expect him to take her seriously, with your cheap rewards,
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your blackmail and your comical rage. This bitter revenge is underlined
with the conclusion that this love is, basically, an exchange of commercial
goods, as in when the wages stop being paid, the relationship will
be over.
Costellos ultimate confusion is saved for a deeply distressed attempt to
understand what can only be the mysteries of sexual relations, as euphemized in Mystery Dance: Romeo asks Juliet about this mystery dance,
because, in his words, hes tried, but hes still mystified.
Strangely enough, how many of us have likely uttered, or at least thought,
those very words, while contemplating the (often tense) joys of love? Elvis
goes even further and enunciates the splendor of our doom. In bed he finds
himself trying to disentangle himself from the physical confusion, and struggles to even distinguish his right foot from his left, but in the end decides
whats the use of looking [at these pornographic pictures] when you dont
know what they mean?
Waiting for the End of the World casts the net of love across the whole of
our civilization, in a Dylanesque series of poetic images. On a rambling train,
a mythical hitchhiker, replete with a two-ton bible and funny cigarettes. . .
suntan lotion and castanets, waits for the end of the world, certain only that
he knows where he is, but with no idea where hes going (maybe Spain?), and
no idea when the end will come.
One of Costellos most popular songs was also one of his most catchy tunes
but it was one of his strangest as well. In The Angels Wanna Wear My Red
Shoes, he tattoos his message on our listening brains. The narrator has moved
from disgust to amusement in the course of his life. He speaks of a bargain with
the angels, in which he gives them his red shoes, and in return. . .well, he heard
an offer he couldnt refuse. He wont get any older he says, and then moves
quickly on to tell of how happy he had been, before she said, drop dead, then
left with another guy. Angels have rusted wings, and thats why they want his
red shoes, but hes been punctured, and views his life now as a punishment
to be borne instead of a gift from above.
Things descend to a fresh new level of weird in Less Than Zero, where
Oswald is tattooed with a swastika, where a boy has a V (for vandal) cut
into his skin, and the television serves to distract everyone else from the
madness all around. But everything means less than zero, Costello decides.
Everything, perhaps, except for his own songs?
My personal favorite from that early masterpiece, My Aim Is True, has been
subjected to endless variations on a terrible set of themes for the last 35 years,
is a song so sad its almost hilarious. Im Not Angry has its tongue firmly
planted in its cheek. In this classic song, Costello addresses a you whos
moved on to another man, and leaves her ex listening downstairs.
He hears whispering and the stutter of ignition. But still, he insists: Im
not angry. Im not angry anymore. Right, we believe you. . .youre not angry!
But the torch this singer carries has already been extinguished by tears of
rage. And hes all out of matches.
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Every one of his successively more sophisticated albums seems to be a

chapter in an ongoing drama playing itself out in the writers heart and mind,
and the drama is reflected through the wonky mirror of Costellos uniquely
grumpy personality and aesthetic sensibility.
On the Punch the Clock album, from 1983, he even uses the metaphor of a
book itself to encapsulate his repeatedly miserable love affairs. In chapter
one, we didnt really get along, in chapter two he fell in love, in chapter
three their love is declared, but in the last chaptersfour, five, and six
you were up to your old tricks.
Costello was always working on the sequel, with each album being both a
precursor to the next and an answer to the last. His theme has remained
consistent throughout, even though his anger level has appeared to mellow
somewhat. By the time he made the utterly distasteful record North (a postKrall effort), many of us were wishing hed return to his mean-spirited rants
and sarcastic funksthey just seemed to produce better songs. And isnt that
what we really want, after all?
But on 2001s Spike, he did manage somewhat of a return to former greatness, even capturing his latest latent feelings in a song title that almost
completely, and coincidentally, contains the essence of his whole oeuvre:
Deep Dark Truthful Mirror.
The face of this mirror, he sings, will eventually tell you things that I still
love you too much to say.
Costellos entire boisterous presence on the pop music landscape has

been precisely that. Hes been telling us the same things ever since 1977, reiterating and rephrasing them the way a great impressionist painter might
approach the same outdoor subject season after season. Costellos is an
indoor subjectthe human heart.
No one really knows who Declan McManus was or is, since he long ago
vanished into the pathology of his creative endeavors. But the work he
has created for Elvis Costello to deliver to us, like a distressingly angstridden letter from home, continues to arrive, season after season. He is
perennial.
He started out croaking, Why is this happening to me? and ended up
moaning, Why is this happening to us? He moved from the personal to the
political and back again, with the ease of the master singer-songwriter who
can never be pinned down by meaning. Hes after the meaning of meaning.
In Smiths study of Costellos oddly crafted torch-song tradition, he refers
to author Brian Hintons still accurate assessment of Costellos unique delivery: The act was distinctive. Hinton describes Costellos intimate vocals
on original songs that explored dark situations. There is something almost
too personal in their delivery, a sense of someone you just dont want in your
life, invading your brain.3
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Costello himself sums it up in this early take on careerism with his usual
couldnt-care-less attitude:
Ive had a strange career in the sense that I started out on an independent
label. I was signed within six months to a very big corporation in America.
I was a pop starthere was no other word for it. I found it really at odds
with what I believed in being a musician for the long term was. From there
on, I just did whatever the hell I wanted to. And left it to the record
company to sort it out. Thats their job.
Mine is to make music; theirs is to sell it. It never said in my contract that
I had to make the same record over and over again.4
No, it didnt, and no, you havent.

I must agree with Larry David Smith in his assessment of the Costello character
as a role containing multiple permutations of a single thesis over the years, and
even his statement that Costellos first outing, My Aim Is True, reflects songwriting strategies that will control the budding auteurs pen for the next 25 years.5
Twenty-five years ago, when a hapless journalist inquired as to why his
songs were so bitter, the Costello character answered, Because Im an
extraordinarily bitter person. I dont like to sound like Im too obsessed and
cant feel any other way, but its just that those songs evince those kinds of
feeling, and therefore, the album is like that. I dont like the idea of getting
too analytical about it.6
Twenty-five years later, his form of self-expression, as an exemplar of the
pathology of the singer-songwriter so perfectly personified by his precursor,
Dylan, and his peer, Waits, can still not only unnerve the listening audience,
but even unsettle the critical audience. And were supposed to be far too
jaded to be scared. But Ill make an exception in his case.
Rolling Stones Kit Rachlis, reacting to the Costello characters vituperative
vocals, used this analogy: Listening to Elvis Costello is like walking down
a dark empty street and hearing another set of heels. His music doesnt make
you dance, it makes you jump.7
As far as I am concerned, in Costello we have the identical feeling of
morbid sensitivity as that lifted, like Atlas, by Brian Wilson. He is the flipside
of Wilsons own self-abnegating niceness. For Costello, that feeling of being
safe in my room that Wilson so innocently opined about was a long-lost surfers dream, melted away by two decades of disappointment. By that time
the room had become a kind of monastic cell. Costello smartly refused to
enter such a tight place.
Smith astutely identified Costellos use of narrative impressionism to
convey the most ironic and sarcastic of emotional stances. In that way, he is
achingly similar to Dylan, since both try to say things so immediately vital
that often the only way to communicate those ideas is through a heavily
veiled set of images and metaphors. We used to call it poetry, remember?
It required our participation in order for it to work properly.
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Indeed, poetic anger was once perfectly valid as a literary art form, even if
expressed through such utterly aggressive attitudes as displayed by the
Costello character. Janet Maslins take is quite instructive:
He sings about violence with a vibrant romanticism, and about love with
murder in his heart. He writes short blunt compositions which dont
pretend to be artful, though they are, and dont demand to be taken seriously, even though theyre more stunning and substantial than anything
rock has produced in a good long while. No Costello song is without its
axe to grind or its hatchet to bury, but at least some emotion, however
strangled, comes through. Costello never sounds exactly willing to give
himself over to sentiment, yet he works hard to make himself more than
marginally accessible: a gangster with a heart.8
Gangster with a heart, indeed. A comment like that also helps shed light on
one of Costellos few peers, the doom-drenched Tom Waits (he of the equally
idiosyncratic style and sensibility) and shows them both to be graduates of
the same reform school. In fact, one can almost listen to Costello as if he were
a British Waits and Waits as if he were an American Costello. We might
already do that without even realizing it.
Like Waits, who blossomed when he embarked into the serious theatre of
Dark Rider, this gangster of love (with apologies to Steve Miller) rose well to
the occasion of composing The Juliet Letters for the Brodsky Quartet. Yet even
there, Costello was rearranging the rules in the ancient game of writing love
songs, and it turned out that the songs were some of his very best in a long
and brilliant career.
This description by Smith in his study of the torch-song tradition sums it
up so very well: Elvis Costello may plead, confess, commentate, or celebrate;
however, what he does most and what he does best is complain.9
Luckily for us, the more he complains, the more he explains. And his
explanations have been so damn entertaining. The lie that tells the truth
always is.
8
The Dare Taker:
Amy Winehouse
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better
I used to have a drug problem, but now I have enough money.

David Lee Roth, Rock Beast, Lead Singer, Van Halen
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true
reality is only in dreams.
Charles Baudelaire, 1860
Two major music industry publications, Rolling Stone and Mojo Magazine, have
recently anointed the gifted Amy Winehouse with flashy cover stories and
revealing narratives that explored the inextricable link between the life and
lifestyle and the artistry and performance of her haunting persona/presence
amongst us on the world stage.
The Rolling Stone article, called Diva with Demons, demonstrated clearly
that you can examine the suffering in Winehouses songs but you cant take
the suffering out of her music, or her personal life, since they are literally dark
mirror images of each other. The Mojo article, called Killing Me Softly
a not too subtle reference to Roberta Flack, one of many songstresses (along
with Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, and Billie Holiday) who Winehouse both
emulates and also strangely surpasseswas an even more harrowing expose.
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When it comes to making your life into your material and your material
into a breathing emblem of your living sorrows, Winehouse seems to have
achieved a new high watermark for such rare creative transformations, and
also a new low depth for such deep and deranged personal indulgences in a
private and public hell.
For the record, I sincerely hope this incredibly talented young singersongwriter manages to survive her demons, her celebrity, and herself. People
with her gifts are breathtaking and mind-expanding to others, and they come
along all too infrequently. Even if only for purely selfish reasonsmostly that
I want and need more of her musicI hope she survives because her special
kind of poetic and musical gifts represent a transcendent dimension to which
all art forms aspire. She has the same kind of edge as was shown by jazz genius
Charlie Parker and the heavenly Nina Simone, all similarly exhibiting a
haughty disdain for limits that sometimes hits heaven on the head. Sometimes.
And I said no, no, no. Indeed, Winehouse says no, in no uncertain terms.
Her whole frail and bony being seems to be but one sharp No. Something tells
me this particular swimming pool seems to be filled with tears, and there is a
rather garish sign preventing potential casual swimmers from even considering
the arc of a dive into its lyrical depths.
Amy Winehouse, a Jewish girl from London, was minus-21 years old
when Joni Mitchell and Marianne Faithfull first laid down the rules for
diaristic-confessional songwriting. She is the latest and perhaps most
tragically talented in a long line of torchy and torched female recording
artists who appear to be forever on the ascendant. Yet, they are seemingly
doomed to swift descent, at the same remarkable time. And in the same
remarkable time.
The young Winehouse has impeccable timingall raw instinct rather than
knowledgeand that timing comes very close to timeless perfection.
But I mean, wait a minute, havent we seen this movie once or twice before?
And isnt that movie called Janis?
Depending on how Winehouses still potentially fruitful life turns out (after
all, the prodigy of pain started writing at 14, started recording at 18, and won
five Grammys for music she wrote and recorded at 23!), she will either go the
forlornly familiar way of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin, or else shell climb
out of her wreckage and sprint forward creatively like Marianne Faithfull or
Joni Mitchell did. I do hope its the latter. Amy deserves to survive.
Yet her current age is that magic age, that same creative peak that was
reached with identical precociousness by Lennon and McCartney, Brian
Wilson, The Stones, and many others. Its not that her youthful brilliance is
unheard of; it isnt. Its just that she has the history of all those who came
before her and from whom she has a crucial lesson to learn about losing the
bet with your mind that drug use truly represents. Alas, she is also now
The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse
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approaching that treacherous age of 27, and in pop music, that age has
sinister overtones.
But the following searing vision, written about by Paul Elliott in his article
in Mojo Magazinethe one with the cover image of Winehouse looking like a
tourist in hellmade my mind immediately return to Varsity Stadium in
Toronto in 1969, when I watched Janis Joplin holding a microphone in one
hand and her bottle of Southern Comfort in the other.
It gives new meaning to the creative notion of what Elliott referred to as
being lost in the moment. Elliots vision was only one year ago:
Singing a song for her husbandWake Up Alone, written in 2005 after he
left her for another womanshe breaks off in the middle of a word, pulls
away from the microphone, and sheds tears for the man shes so desperately
in love with; a man currently held in a prison cell. All her songs contain
intimations of that sorrowfully self-deprecating insight, Ill be some other
mans next woman soon.
Winehouse shields her face with one hand and takes several faltering
steps backwards, overwhelmed with emotion, and apparently drunk.
As the music plays on, she grabs at the mike-stand for support. Illuminated
by a single spotlight, the tortured artist is laid bare in a moment of
transcendent intensity.1
One imagines a present-day Judy Garlandshe of the scary magic of her

Carnegie Hall phase. What kind of songs can cause performers to behave in
this manner, cause them to live in the manner required for it to be sung about
with such a combination of fierce emotional gusto and insane dedication to
divulging all? Well, the kind that Amy Winehouse pulls out of herself with
the ease of an angel.
The intensity that Elliott saw and heard is the principal feature of the near
shamanistic realm of certain performers who remind us that performance is
a ritual. The performers are the ones who invite us to transcend our own identities while we witness the shaman-singers living out their most devastating
unconscious urges in songs that capture a deeply human feeling with crystalline clarity.
As a journalist, what makes Elliotts take on Winehouses mesmerizing
alchemy of rapture and decay so valuable is that he was fortunate enough
to have encountered her at two key stages of her meteoric career. He first
interviewed her back in 2004, the year after the release of her debut record,
Frank, to some considerable critical and public acclaim.
That record was made out of the pain of the breakup of a relationship with
an earlier boyfriend, someone as yet unnamed. The beginnings of a creative
template and dilemma were already forming. Elliott was also in attendance
at the notorious Birmingham concert in 2007, and his coverage was downright distinct in its acclamationa judgment with which I enthusiastically
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agreeof her remarkable powers as a singer-songwriter. She is the finest

female vocalist of her generation.
However, since the release of her second album, Back to Black (2006), on
which the spine-tingling single Rehab is but a mere hint of the shapes of
darkness to come (and which was justly accorded that handful of Grammys),
her life has replaced her art as a source of fascination for both the press and
the public.
Yet listening to Frank, a promising but uneven introduction when
compared to the astonishingly mature masterpiece that would follow, it
should have been clear at the outset that there never was any distance, no
separation at all in fact, between Winehouses art and the life that fueled it
forward. She is the latest proof of Updikes marvelous insight that celebrity
is a mask that eats into the face.
This young troubadour has barely had time to adjust and define her writing
mask (the way her predecessors didartists like P.J. Harvey, Neenah Cherry,
Sade, even Annie Lennox, to name a few), and already her mask is falling
off before our eyes. The reason is simple: unlike Dylan or Lennon, who wore
hundreds of masks, or Mitchell and Faithfull, whose masks are truly transparent, Winehouse doesnt actually wear a mask at all. She hasnt even had
time to imagine one, and here we are telling her in no uncertain terms, dont
bother, you dont need a mask, well be happy to watch your actual face melt
away in real time.
Elliott stresses, When she sings those songs from Back to Black, songs written for the man she loves when they were first apartshes keeping him close
to her. This is not art imitating life, this is art as life and life as art. Its what
makes Amy Winehouse so compelling, and what makes her the greatest soul
singer.2
Also important to note is the fact that, like the first one, this latest album
was a response to the breakdown of her relationship with a boyfriendthe
incarcerated one she unfortunately married, and who shall also be unnamed,
at least in these pages. Does one instantly sense a pattern here? I hope not.
Surely shes too talented for that trap. But as we have seen, and heard, both
lesser talents and greater talents can become addicted to the source of their
musical and emotional raw material: their personal lives. Music, says
Winehouse, is something in my life where I can be completely honest, to
the point where some of the songs I dont want to sing sometimes, because
theyre so raw, and it hurts me when I sing certain lyrics.3
Like another temperamental and youthful folk-soul singer from long ago,
Janis Ian, who also started living out through music at about the same age
of 15, Winehouse makes us all wince at the collision between young love
and social conventions such as race, beauty, and gender. But she takes that
touching torment way, way past that particular Janis, into a postmodern
twenty-firstcentury schizoid stew. And she does it in such a damn hot
way! Even at her worst, Amy is on fire physically and spiritually and finds
a special place that only she can travel towards. Its in that same place others
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have passed through, where they have carved their glistening names or
initials into the walls. We just hope Amy doesnt catch up to that other Janis.
In order to somewhat atone for her recent bad behavior, and even worse
musical and artistic behavior, assuming she is able to overcome her own
demons, she can win us back into her broken heart if she agrees to give us
at least four or five more records: a followup to Back to Black, hopefully with
a title like Back to Being Alive, then, three straight good albums
produced by equally gifted producers (someone like Daniel Lanois would
do nicely) until the grand finale, a mature masterpiece like those of Joni
Mitchells middle phase, or Marianne Faithfulls late phase, or those of the
master, Dylan, at any time, even when he was in a trance.
Why? Because only then can we really properly judge whether she belongs in
the same book as those survivors. She seems to, from this woozy first-date kind
of vantage point. Sure, those others suffer, they sing for us. But they survive.
They are professional survivors. Keith Richards survived to sing, even if in a
raspy way. David Bowie survived to croon and warble at us. Waits survived to
growl and mumble his method acting style. Costello survived to snipe and bark
at us; but keep it up Elvis, we love it. Even Brian Wilson survived himself to
remind us of what music is actually supposed to be doing to and for us all
achieving the transformation of leaden pain into golden pleasure.
Paul McCartney survived being John Lennons partnerno easy task
considering that, as an innovator, John was accidentally as brilliant as Dylan.
Sir Solo Paul even proved that, although light-hearted, his music is still truly
blessed with magic. Paul Simon survived to whisper sweet nothings in our ear.
Lindsey Buckingham survived being the lead guitarist and writer for Fleetwood
Macan almost impossible taskonly to demonstrate mature solo skills that
were often submerged in the collective collaborative brilliance that was Mac.
Incredibly, even Elton John has survived being himself and continues to
impersonate the character created for him by his boyhood chum, songwriter
Bernie Taupin. These folks were serious sufferers, clairvoyant entertainers
who merely let us watch and listen to them living and dying. All were asking
Ms. Winehouse to do is survive and make more music. Thats not asking too
much, is it? Well find out.
Her first record, Frank, was an amazing entry onto a very crowded and
creative stage. It was the kind of event where dancers clear the way for superior movers, where singers hush their voices and scratch their heads at what
is being channeled there.
At 20, Elliott explained, Amy Winehouse could sing with the power and
worldliness of a veteran, but was still growing up. She smoked dope, drank
heavily and swore like a football manager, but she was still, at heart, an
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unsophisticated young girl.4 The personal narrative that caused this talent to
form a short-lived rap group with a girlfriend at 10, to play with her brothers
guitar until she got one of her own, to teach herself how to play, to start writing her own songs at 14 because she seemingly couldnt find any contemporary musicians who were expressing what she felt (remember, she was born
in 1983, when Madonna and Michael Jackson were writing songs designed
solely to move the body around, so shes not only postmodern post-punk,
shes post-twentieth century) is the same which got her a record deal when
she was only 16.
Incredibly enough, she was a client of the same management firm that
represented The Spice Girls, far away on another Svengali planet, which
eventually got her a record label deal inked by Darcus Beese for an unsuspecting Island Records.
Like some other teenage girls, unfortunately, Amy also experienced selfwounding, bulimia, and anorexia, along with any variety of private challenges, long before she became addicted to drugs and alcohol, as well as bad
men. Those things, as she has pointed out so clearly in her song and the video
for it, Rehab, are not the real problems; they are just her failed attempts at
solutions to the real problem: depression.
The downside of public therapeutic art making is acute. Everything
changed. Suddenly, her life was being played out, not only in her music, but
in the press. When someone has their heart broken as Amy has, they cant
help but believe that only that person can put it back together,5 Elliott wrote.
I hope that doesnt mean that we have to wait for boyfriend number three
before we can savor future sorrows in gorgeous songs.
But what, in the end, is she actually singing about? Her selfs search for
itself, of course, just like all dark mirrors everywhere, except with a sizzling
degree of vulnerability not seen or heard for years. Vintage Laura Nyro had
some of the same emotional temperature.
Winehouses debut album is now one on which she has cast her own critical doubts, commenting publicly that she would have done it differently.
She is a little unhappy with the results, mostly because the label forced her
to include certain things that were not really her. One senses she is correct
and smart enough to know that the opening intro of random scat singing, in
the style of Sara Vaughn or Ella, was a mere affectation and commercial
emblem, almost as if to say, Here is the great new girl on the block, listen
to how she has absorbed the great goddesses of the past, listen to her jazzy
inheritance.
That little cannibalism, and a few of the other songs that try to touch the
past on the way to the future, are unnecessary and obstructive, since they
merely delay the delivery of Amy Winehouses true greatness: her own soul,
her own voice, her own incredible language and idiosyncratic stance.
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In addition, that album suffers from a certain flavor of production, a

mix-master style that allows one song to slam into the next without pause,
another affectation borrowed from the young club scene, where several turntables spin overlapping and rapidly morphing musical messages.
Back then, those long six years ago, the image on the Frank cover was of a
gorgeous young girl with smoldering semitic features, on a face that could
have embraced almost any ethnicity. I was smitten, like so many others, right
away. But it was only when she opened her mouth and her voice poured out
that I fell in love; it was impossible not to, since every song is about that
falling feeling, whether falling forward or falling backward. Everyone wants
to fall, and Winehouses specialty is falling.
After the useless and distracting, but thankfully very brief, intro of necrophiliac scat, the song Stronger Than Me bursts into our rooms as one of
the clearly masterful debut songs in years, maybe decades. It is addressed
mostly to the lost man, an ex-lover who, according to the song apparently
was seven years older than Winehouse, and therefore perhaps should have
been seven times as strong, seven times as wise. But he wasnt.
Although probably not the Frank of the albums title (that character
could just as easily be the black Scottish terrier being walked on a leash by
the healthy, pretty singer on the cover, or even just the state of mind she
espouses so well in songthat of being frank about love, life, and whatever
else she chooses), whoever he was, the ex-lover could not make the grade
because he was awed by her and unable to take control and be the man.
Assuming she was about 18 at the time, given the time required to break up
and produce the musical soundtrack for it, her ex-lover must have been about
25. This preternaturally aged girl, this retroactively old soul, cries out plaintively, Dont you know that you supposed to be the man, not pale in comparison to who you think I am? She later emphasizes her point, as if the
poor schlep hadnt yet figured out her oddly Lolita-like message, that she
doesnt have any interest in meeting his mother. All she wants is to rip
his body over hers.
Welcome to the monkey house, Amy Winehouse! In quick succession, the
torch begins to glow brighter and brighter, and in You Sent Me Flying,
she intones, And though hes nothing in the scheme of my years, it just
serves to bludgeon my futile tears, and Im not used to this.
Commanding all the karmic ferocity stuffed into her meager years, the
singer next declares that her new guitar, Cherry, understands her better
than her ex-lover: Maybe we could talk about things, if you were made of
wood and strings.
Then suddenly, and without any warning, she shifts gears and creates a sparkling but subversive jazz-pop song (or is it pazz-jop?) in Fuck Me Pumps, an
anthem to a different sort of girl power than the kind promoted by so many
other more conventional female vocalists. Dont be mad at me coz ya pushing
thirty and your old tricks no longer work, you should have known from the
jump that youll always get dumped, so dust off your fuck me pumps.
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The character in the songs then pushes past all the social limits placed upon
young girls, especially the one about not emulating the behavior of their other
peer age group, the boys. After describing the similarities between her
ex-lover and the recent boy toy she has been sleeping with, she casually
explains that it was dark, and since she was lying down, it was difficult for
her to recognize that it was not her ex-lover she was with. As a result, she
sarcastically pleads that it wasnt really infidelity, since she was thinking of
him when she came. You are everything, he means nothing to me, I cant
even remember his name, she sings, as if that is somehow going to make
him feel better.
The next song, There Is No Greater Love, is one of the ones she shouldnt
have even attempted, not because she couldnt sing it, she could, but only
because it was too tame and polite for her. As a result, it sounds like a Jekyll
and Hyde scenario, which the album in fact really is, but it is also one which
celebrates enough of the Hyde-Amy to give us a delectable taste of what is
to come later on. Further down.
Both In My Bed and Take the Box are shockingly mature attempts to
express the road to maturity and beyond. In some ways, they express a maturity greater than any actual adults could ever hope to attain, since the character involved has yet to lose the innocent allegiance to impossible truths
we refer to as childhood.
In My Bed contains the first hint of an animal bleat that has recurred
often in her still short career: Youll never get my mind right, like two ships
passing in the night want the same thing when we lay, otherwise mines a
different way.
Take the Box is a slow grinding goodbye saga that reveals her to be old
beyond her years when she sighs with resignation, Mr. False Pretense, you
just dont make, I just dont know you, but you make me cry, wheres my kiss
goodbye?
But the theme song of the path she would take and the soundtrack of the
movie she would soon be starring in (the one we are watching unfold as 2008
draws to a close) is properly announced with the opening song in a sequence
that ends the Frank album: Amy Amy Amy gives us all the goods. It points
at a signpost down the road saying do not travel this way for on this way lay
monsters. Now you know youre too hard to ignore, masculine within your
shell, I think youd wear me well, Amy, Amy, Amy, wheres my moral parallel?
What the meaning of moral parallel might be we would soon discover on
her followup album, three years later. In the meantime, there was the messy
life lived in public.
My sole interest here is in Winehouses apparently remarkable talent as a

singer-songwriter and inheritor of a freedom to express the deepest darkest
insights into human behavior.
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Yes, she, like absolutely every other figure in this book, did stumble into
substance abuse, the kind of stumbling that wasnt funny (like heavy rock
icon David Lee Roth liked to pretend it was). It seems to be one of the inherent
urges in them all, and one that makes Winehouse the latest and possibly most
dramatic of dark mirrors. To write about her music is to write about her,
because there is no artistic substance apart from that, which is why in addition to substance abuse, there should be a unique designation for something
akin to personality abuse.
All these seminal figures, including Winehouse, and especially most of her
historic precursors, without exception fell prey to what the nineteenthcentury French poet Charles Baudelaire called artificial paradise, in his landmark study of the poetic effects of hashish use on the craft of creating ideas
and images. The paradox is, of course, that in our celebrity-driven popular
culture, a talented but zonked figure like Keith Richards can be chosen to be
the new face for Louis Vuitton, the luxury accessory manufacturer.
But back to Winehouses moral parallel, and Back to Black.
Im fairly certain that the black in question refers to a combination of dark
depression and an actual blackout state. Its been reported that the young
singer expressed interest in an advance copy of a current biography, not, as
the publishers feared, in order to squash its exposure, but rather because
she was interested in learning about what she had been up to in the last
few years. Especially since, according to one spokesperson, she has reported
having vague memories of going into the studio in 2002 (to record Frank)
but that everything is a bit blurred after that.
This means, incredibly enough, that part of that blur was the astonishing
creative burst of writing, composing, collaborating, performing, and recording the musical and emotional volcano which produced her followup album,
Back to Black. All after tantalizing audiences with the single release of the song
that provides the anthem and mantra chant for all things Amy: Rehab.
And part of that blur was grabbing all those Grammys!
No one watching that Grammy show was more surprised than Amy and
her mother watching via satellite from London. This cant be happening, their
eyes and expressions seemed to say: You mean I am (she is) actually being
rewarded for living this way?
But she was rewarded, and she should be rewarded, at least for the singersongwriter part of it all. Yet, what subterranean logic could have predicted
that this young white Jewish girl with a penchant for soulful heartache would
encounter a black funk-soul group called The Dap-Kings, who had already
released three albums of intense James Brown/Etta James fueled full-force
funk?
Winehouse borrowed The Dap-Kings, formerly of local Sharon Jones
and The Dap-Kings fame, for a clutch of cuts on Back to Black as well as for
a multiple city tour of the electric and scintillating live performances that
cemented her place as a contender for several best of categories. Now is
the ideal time to register the proper acclaim for this incredibly tight unit.
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They built the shimmering scaffolding that supports her poetic melodrama
as it plays out like an oceanic wave of melancholy that engulfs the audience,
making it sway in some exotic state of collective rapture. Their performances were downright Grateful Dead-like. It was spooky. Even footage
conveys it.
Back to Black is a masterpiece, every lamentable and inching moment of it;

there is no doubt about that. The only question is whether she can live with
the famous, wealthy, and celebrated person who now does the writing and
singing, and there have been so many who could not. Now, that person who
needs the new raw material for new albums must search for it in a different
place, in a different way.
She needs to take a reasonable amount of time off, surround herself with
reasonably clean friends, and move into bigger and better digs with a builtin home studio, so she doesnt have to stumble down the street looking for
her producer. Speaking of which, she needs to bond with that producer, and
with whoever her future band will be, enough for them to trust and love her
as much as Big Brother and The Holding Company trusted and loved Janis,
and with as much musical devotion.
Since they need to worship Amy musically, but not baby her psychologically, there is a fine line to be walked. The record executives have a crucial
role to play as well, avoiding at all costs becoming the corporate enabler,
while also encouraging more creation and production of what it is they do
have to sell, after all.
Winehouse can only do all this second-stage growing up, at the ripe old age
of 25, if she pays attention to the lessons of her elders, and to so many fellow
devotees of that same artificial paradise first described by Chuck Baudelaire in
1860. But that also means she has to learn the lessons of both the living and the
dead creative elders, in order to ever possibly record Back to Being Alive.
And if the music really matters in the end, she will.
Amy Winehouse has a huge musical legacy from the brilliant singersongwriters who rose to prominence in the 1960s and provided her with a
map to this territory, but she also has a huge emotional burden tied to the
now raging expectation that you top your best and do it again, and again,
and againthe way Dylan, Mitchell, Faithfull, Waits, Costello, Elton, and
others did. Over and over again.
At first glance, today it would appear that there are several youngish
contemporary reflections in Joni Mitchells dark blue mirror, and perhaps
Sarah McLaughlin, Alanis Morrisette, or Kate Bush might qualify for a
glimpse into its depths. But the same cannot be said for Norah Jones, Diana
Krall, Joss Stone, Cat Power, or their softer stylistic tribes. Erykah Badu is, of
course, the real thing, which is why she is about the only singer I can
adequately compare Winehouse to.
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The wounded-goddess mirror, naturally enough, disconcerts certain audience members more used to hearing the heavy duty poetic pronouncements
of real men who could play the blues, weep and rage at The Fates, who were
usually depicted as feminine figures: the muse monster. But the kind of
women who would emerge in the post-60s music universe were already
themselves The Lady Killers: Yoko Ono and Patti Smith, followed through
the decades by Madonna, Sinead OConnor, Bjork, and perhaps the most
talented one yet, P.J. Harvey. All of them were walking on thin ice, slipping
and sliding on a skating rink owned by men, which made them still seem to
be outsiders, no matter how successful they really ever became.
After all, there have been lady killers aplenty who emulated the best of the
worst life livers and death lovers. Patti Smith and Courtney Love obviously
spring to mind readily, both being extremely talented girl guides to hell in
their own rights.
As Charles Chaplin once wistfully sang, Smile though your heart is
breaking.
Sometimes we get the blues so bad we have no recourse but to laugh,
although its a low, dark laughter with more than a whisper of depression.
Joni Mitchell has possibly the bluest mirror imaginable in this regard.
The highly structured and male-dominated style of music known officially
as the blues is merely a stylized version of the much more anarchic and
chaotic emotional territory that both Mitchell and Marianne Faithfull
explored in their own uniquely feminine ways. Unvarnished. These deep
roots of the feminine psyche in popular music, stemming from the earliest
days of Memphis Minnie and Bessie Smith, is hugely evident right up to the
present day, in the voraciously talented but utterly adrift Winehouse, or even
in the much lesser talented but seriously committed Cobain widow icon.
Back when Cobain famously intoned Nirvanas grunge mantra, Smells
Like Teen Spirit, and croaked With the lights out its less dangerous, here
we are now, entertain us, I feel stupid and contagious, here we are now, entertain us, he could have been chanting on behalf of dark mirrors everywhere,
and perhaps especially invoking the skeletal ghost of Amy Winehouse, future
multiple Grammy winner.
The young Nick Drake in the early 70s and the stunned genius Kurt Cobain
in the 90s were suitably scarred by their swift rise and fall and both ended
sadly in a self-indulgent binge of Byronic proportions, as did the inimitable
lizard king, Jim Morrison, another majestic salesman of musical mayhem
and poetic madness. They, like Winehouse, were jumping at shadows.
Jim Morrison of The Doors was evoking her same dank muse when he
slurred, The face in the mirror wont stop, the girl in the window wont
drop, a feast of friends, Alive she cried, waiting for me, outside in When
the Musics Over. Jim and Amy obviously share the same special friend.
It was people like Morrison that gave Winehouse the permission to do what
she is doing now, live, right in front of our very eyes. Because he did it so
damn well himself!
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Unwilling to let mere mortal men outdo her own histrionic dash to the
grave (remember, it was her own mother who glumly speculated that her
daughter might not live to see whether she would win any awards at this
years Grammys, where she eventually won an unprecedented five big ones),
Winehouse appears to be enacting a new wrinkle in the battle of the sexes:
Anything you can do, I can do better. Including destroying myself in front
of the spotlights.
Now, its not as if Winehouse is the first gifted, popular, acting-out female
artist to engage in extracurricular self-destruction, even if she has been
anointed by all of our own favorite self-immolators: Brian Jones, Syd Barrett,
Phil Ochs, Jimi Hendrix, or Tim Buckley.
But Winehouse, a seriously accomplished musician and gifted gazer into
the darkness, manages to take this game to a whole new level of danger,
and in such a highly public manner, that she seems to be acting out something
even deeper and darker than that now old-fashioned Janis-Joplin
syndrome. Something considerably darker.
If the pop song evolved into the soundtrack for the last century, as it so
clearly seems to have done, what does that tell us about the emotional movie
we all live in?
In Winehouses case, everything from her image and persona to her lyrics
and instrumentation seems to be saying to all of us: You too can be me!
What this might mean in our age of celebrity addiction and in light of our
consistent appetite for the more prurient side to our icons is almost too scary
to contemplate.
After all, exactly which part of our collective social psyche does Winehouse
mirror? Whereas her creative progenitors (the Joni Mitchell/Marianne Faithfull and Nina Simone/Billie Holiday star cluster) were still dark mirrors, in
the young Winehouse we arrive at an artist who is more of a shadow. Instead
of reflecting as those others do, she seems to cast and project her creative
shadow across our cultural landscape in a most distressing manner. Shes just
that good.
Or, is her shadow telling us that, not only can we potentially be her, but also
that she is just like us? After all, there have been dark-dwellers in the music
field before, some of them very gifted and many of them utterly doomed
emotionally. Leonard Cohen sang of doom but somehow survived, perhaps
due to his personal regime of regular Buddhist psychic cleansings; Lou Reed
was the poster boy for doomed darkness and somehow evolved into the
senior statesman and ambassador representing the country of angst.
For the moment, from Amy Winehouse and her astounding aura we have
been taken on a musical ride of some consequence. The ride is called Wheres
my moral parallel? Her message is tattooed onto our consciences. It is a
masterpiece of melancholy music that melts in your mind, not in your ear.
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On this ride, the words are the safety belt we use to strap ourselves onto the
music. Unlike Dylans method, that of crying out, The ghost of electricity
howls in the bones of her face in one of his greatest songs, Winehouse
doesnt use fancy poetic metaphors like many female Dylanettes do; instead,
she uses the vernacular of her world in a dream stew of hip-hop, classic jazz,
soul/dance, and folk music from hell. Its especially effective too, because
oddly enough, the ghost of electricity does howl in Amy Winehouses face.
And we all thought that was just some enigmatic Dylan metaphor!
She says what she sees, even if what she sees is simply that which is staring
back at her from her own mirror.
The opening cut on Back to Black, Rehab, sounds like Judy Garland on
acid, or perhaps Billie Holiday on ecstasy crooning from the grave would be
more accurate. Winehouses special genius, apart from finding the absolutely
perfect writing collaborators and a positively sublime backup band made in
heaven just for her, is declaiming: Cause theres nothing, nothing you can
teach me, that I cant learn from Mr. Hathaway, perhaps a reference to her
incarcerated husband, or her high school teacher, or else, any man wearing
a fine shirt. Though her current marriage with a convict is presently in a holding pattern, at least until visiting hours, that particular marriage made in hell
provided the fertilizer for these songs when the husband was still only the
boyfriend from hell, but who left temporarily only to return to conscientiously finish the job.
What job? The job that bad boyfriends always do on brilliant singers like
this one, singers who have embraced oblivion as their personal savior. What
else is black, if not a combination of depression, bad boy, and blackout? After
all, Ms. Winehouse has publicly admitted to only vaguely recalling going into
the studio in 2002, after which the picture gets fuzzy. Some do it to themselves
but most get some help along the way.
Some of us would like to respectfully remind her that, yes, though admittedly on occasion she did embarrass herself, she also somehow managed
to create this magical and mesmerizing music out of the deepest part of
her bad girls heart and its breathtaking ache. She allowed all of us to have
aural sex with her at the same time. And as Iggy Pop once famously declared,
I want more!
Its difficult to adequately describe in words the feelings in the songs, and
the feeling of her singing. Perhaps writing about music really is like dancing
about architecture, like Elvis Costello said is was. These singer-songwriters
are often proven correct both in advance and retroactivelyno mean feat.
In You Know Im No Good, one of the most powerful songs on Back to
Black, you know right away that this is no mere persona being presented by
a performer. I cheated myself, like I knew I would, I told you I was trouble,
you know that Im no good.
Troubled would be accurate perhaps, under the circumstances. But she is so
very good at emotional vivisection via the popular song, todays most potent
form of communication. Me and Mr. Jones, the track that follows, is an
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unfortunate love song indeed, due to the circumstances apparently beyond

the control of the challenged singer.
Just Friends is a little too cloying to be included on an album such as this
one, but with a sense of instant conscience, I have to wonder whether that
means Im guilty of wanting yet more suffering from her and criticizing her
for having a somewhat stalwart human sentiment? Im honestly not sure,
but there certainly is an inherent danger here in getting too used to what a
recording artist does too well.
The best song is the rousing anthem-in-reverse, Back to Black, with its
huge wall of sound echo environment, its Supremes style forward propulsion
and its Spector-drenched girl-power ambience. And I tread a troubled track,
my odds are stacked, Ill go back to black.
Love Is a Losing Game, one of the saddest love songs of all time, grips
the heart of the listener who is brave enough to try to share the simple sentiment, Over futile odds, and laughed at by the gods, and now the final frame,
love is a losing game. It grips but doesnt let go, not only after the song is
over, but even after the album is over. The listener can never forget the tone
of resigned doom in the sweetly swirling voice of this desperately disappointed young woman.
My Tears Dry on Their Ownwell, thats true, but so, unfortunately,
does the mascara. So we are history, your shadow covers me, the sky above,
a blaze that only lovers see. But descriptive words can never fully capture
the strange essence of Winehouses complex gift for melody, and that alone,
apart from her stark staring honesty, is the one element in her mix that keeps
her from becoming utterly maudlin or mawkish. Her ability to stretch a feeling across a sound and send it spinning out of that magnificent vocal equipment, hovering above the highly intelligent rhythms of the perfect band for
her, is what separates her from the merely self-indulgent chanteuse.
Wake Up Alone is the song that she couldnt continue singing live last
year. Some observations about behavior are so wounded, so deeply, that the
concept of entertainment flies out the window. This is another fine line this
artist treads, the chancy border between music and madness. It raises the
question as to whether there is anything that might be simply too much to
try to include in a song, or whether the pop song is the perfect contemporary
tool for expressing what used to be conveyed in paintings or poetry in earlier
ages. Only time, and her survival, will tell.
Some Unholy War is a paradoxical take on supporting your lover no matter
what, especially since some people really are fighting in unholy wars across the
globenot as characters in a song, but in real trenches instead of her battlefield
of the human heart. Sometimes, we can take analogy only so far, before it
stretches to the breaking point. But then again, the breaking point is the secret
subject of all her music anyway: He still stands in spite of what his scars say,
Ill battle till this bitter finale, just me, my dignity and this guitar case.
Suddenly the ideal motif for helping to understand Winehouses condition
and its message has been incidentally provided: she is a singing scar, the
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reference to a wound that cant or wont go away. Or one that we wont let her
forget, if we keep rewarding her for pain upon delivery.
In the closing lament, He Can Only Hold Her, Winehouse gets down to
the brass tacks of the other woman her boyfriend left her for (before deciding
that a better living could be maintained with Winehouse again, and so
returning to wed, and perhaps seal her fate), unless, of course, she is referring
to herself retroactively. But she seldom uses even conventional devices for
telling a story in song, eschewing any artifice in favor of always calling things
by their right names. How can he have her heart, when it got stole, though
he tries to pacify her, cause whats inside her never dies.
It might be true that whats inside never dies, but the outside is certainly not
as invulnerable, and it is the vast outside semblance of being a person which
this singer is so close to losing, in danger of transforming herself into a mere
cipher for pain. It is here that we come to the central problem of Amy
Winehouse, or one of them at least, and it is why I have devoted such length
to considering her consummate craftthe danger of becoming utterly solipsistic and being distantly removed from any interaction with the world in
which we have to live.
Solipsism, the self alone, is the key danger or flaw that all the best singersongwriters occasionally court, some more than others. Its hazard is to focus
so much on I, me, and mine that ones self-absorption fogs up the mirror
and prevents the audience from sharing the sentiment.
In some circles it is even discussed theoretically, in philosophical terms, as
the belief that the self alone exists, or can be proven to exist, even though it
removes any possibility from positing a viable society of individuals sharing
a consensus reality. It suggests that our world, my world, is the sole arbiter,
and that the apparent existence of other people and their messy other minds
is a mere hallucination. Solipsism is a flood that threatens all creative people,
but especially singer-songwriters of the dark mirror variety.
It swamped John Lennon and caused him to hide for five years in his apartment while his future widow took care of the business of a legacy he had long
since denied and run away from. Unfortunately, he forgot that when one
declares that the dream is over, it also portends the end of the dreamer,
whether we like it or not. It swamped Kurt Cobain and caused him to feel that
he had betrayed his own moral code of ethics by becoming rich and famous,
with noisy and messy consequences indeed.
Winehouse also seems to be recklessly emulating the late Nico, the nihilist
vocalist with the early and historic Velvet Underground, who only sang about
Nico, Nico, Nico. All we are asking, Amy, is for you to give yes a chance.
But if Amy Winehouse really has no moral parallel, as one early song
suggested, perhaps she might ironically be free from that kind of radical
self-doubt. She is important because she has taken the notion of reflecting
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her human feelings in our human mirror to the ultimate extreme, often only
hinted at by even greater talents.
We are all witnessing the flood now rising around this musical marvel.
Someone, please throw this girl a life jacket, because if her head goes under,
her voice goes with it. Like I said, only time will tell. As the novelist Joyce
Carol Oates once observed, Time is the element in which we exist, we are
either borne along by it or drowned by it.
Lately, while being so immersed in Winehouses deeply moving music,
I have also been struck by the strange parallels between this talented singersongwriter and a fictional character portrayed by the late Suzanne Pleshette
in a film adaptation of John OHaras Rage to Live.
Its not just the curious clone-like nature of the beehive hairstyle worn by
Pleshette in this vintage 1965 soap opera, or even the manias shared by
both the singer and this cinematic character. It goes deeper and touches
the sad but fitting epigram that OHara used in the book and that the film
also utilized.
The epigram was from the English poet, Alexander Pope, way back in 1740
in his prescient piece called Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of Women, and if
Pope were alive today, he would undoubtedly be writing for either Rolling
Stone or Mojo Magazine: With pleasures too refined to please, with too much
spirit to ever be at ease, with too much quickness ever to be taught, with too
much thinking to have common thought: who purchase pain with all that
joy can give, and die of nothing but a rage to live.6
PART TWO
CONTINENTS
INTRODUCTION:
THE SINGER-SONGWRITER IN A PARTNERSHIP
There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe the world is
divided into two kinds of people, and the kind that dont. But often, whether
we like it or not, those two inevitably find each other.
All of the island figures in the first part of this book, regardless of their
personal styles or sensibilities, had one thing in common, apart from their
remarkable talents as singer-songwriters and performers. They were each able
to achieve that rare state of mind that psychologists refer to as the flow state,
a state of intense concentration during which the world disappears, along
with time itself, and all that remains is the powerful sensation of floating in a
moment of pure movement, of creative flow, where their songs largely seem
to write themselves. And they are each by themselves, within that somewhat hallowed and much sought after state of solitary creation and delivery.
But just try to imagine the chagrin of creative artists who achieve that same
flow state, but only in the company of a certain partner and collaborator, the
one who provides the necessary and essential other ingredient required to
make their music come to life. Sometimes the way to the flow state is doubled
up in two interdependent creative partners. We dont know why. Or, even
more intriguing, why it is that each of the players is a perfect half of something
whole. Such is the frustrating fate of the many talented duos covered in this
second part of the book.
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For these creative marriages made in hell, since they are often highly
combustible and fraught with competitive impulses, the prevailing theme
soundtrack could well be that old Neil Sedaka song titled, Breaking Up Is
Hard To Do. As a matter of fact, breaking up for this wild wrecking crew is
not only hard, it is often all but impossible, since one without the other ceases
to exist in the way they and we need them to exist in order to do the job at hand.
As part of our shared cultural memory, we can clearly witness the dynamics
of one supremely successful collaboration, that of John Lennon and Paul
McCartney. We can also examine the exotic extremes of the somewhat less
successful but still highly charged emotional and creative collaboration
between Lennon and Yoko Ono, which replaced the first collaboration. Obviously, there is a definite public perception that one was a good collaboration
and one was a bad collaboration. But which is which and how can we tell?
In 1968, commenting on his famous songwriting partners liaison with
the infamous Ono, McCartney himself sarcastically said, When two great
Saints meet, it is a humbling experience. Yet he could almost have been
describing the Lennon-McCartney musical miracle itself, just as easily as the
Lennon-Ono heresy. He could also have been describing the pivotal and
crucial feeling we all experience when we encounter, enjoy, and experience
the results of the nearly sacred partnerships being explored herein.
There is indeed a curious star-crossed element to the encounter between
any two great creative partners, nearly to the point of a synchronistic destiny
best summed up by that astute observer of human nature, the surrealist
Andre Breton, when he declared that in all our lives what at first appears to
be coincidence is later revealed to be merely desire reaching its quarry.
So it is with a great creative team.
In other words, certain creative equations involving certain artistic individuals seem nearly inevitable, or at least hard to imagine otherwise, whether or
not the collaboration in question is a heavenly or a hellish one. Their shared state
of creative flow operates at a truly stellar level, despite the fact that their relationships are often so incendiary and charged with dreadful hubris that they are
pretty well spontaneously combusting with every egomaniacal breath they take.
It struck me that the Lennon and McCartney relationship of creative
collaboration, so fertile and astonishing in its abundance, and the subsequent
Lennon and Ono collaboration, so controversial and nave in its audacity,
were similar in many important ways to their less mainstream counterparts.
Suddenly and almost without realizing it, I began exploring the odd fact
that, so often, the best artistic work in our culture (modern and postmodern
Europe and North America that is) is produced in partnership by polar
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opposites who can barely tolerate each other. They remain in partnerships
because no one else seems able to spark their creative magic as well as their
most intimate enemytheir mortal friend. Perhaps creative people see the
hand of destiny in their own desires, who knows?
After a while, I began to see this subject as a study of artistic marriages
made in hell, an ironically entertaining subject for the rest of us, as it turns
out, since we are the consumers and beneficiaries of the diverting and riveting cultural side effects of their artistic suffering.
Just consider the range of these names and the stature of the work they
produced together, with some of them still going at it after all these years.
We have the permanently troubled waters of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel,
the glimmering spotlight contest of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, the
explosive angst of Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, the raunchy obsessions of Neil Young and Steven Stills, the doomed domestic vortex of Richard
and Linda Thompson, and on and on.
Exactly what is happening here? What does all of this mean?
According to Vera John-Steiner, in her book Creative Collaboration, all of us
have been held in the thrall of an illusory cultural assumption.
Rodins famous sculpture, The Thinker, dominates our collective imagination as the purest representation of human inquiry. . .the lone, stoic thinker.
Yet while the western belief in individualism romanticizes this perception of
the solitary creative process, the reality is that artistic forms usually emerge
from the joint thinking, passionate conversations, emotional connections and
shared struggles common in all meaningful relationships. Many of these
collaborators complemented each other in major ways, meshing different
backgrounds and forms into fresh styles of thinking, while others completely
transformed their respective fields.1
Her book also clearly indicated that some of them simply loathed working
together in the first place.
John-Steiner illustrated that the creative mind, rather than thriving on solitude, is clearly dependent upon the reflection, renewal, and trust inherent in
sustained human and professional relationships. Such compelling depictions
demonstrate the key associations that nurtured our most talented artists and
thinkers. While compelling, the creative alliances she studied are generally
synchronized and synergistic, where supportive compromise reigns. What
motivates such extended collaboration is generally some deep compatibility.
What is equally intriguing is the coupling of certain successful creative
ensembles who are woefully, utterly, and entertainingly incompatible.
What fascinates me much more than mere disharmony, however, are those
teams where the creative discord itself is the key to success. They are the
perversely clever ones who compel our attention.
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And so this glimpse into the geography of the imagination triggers one of
our most puzzling cultural questions: why is it that much of our great music
is so often produced collaboratively by creative partners who cant stand the
sight of each other? Why do some of the most inventive partnerships involve
individuals who can barely be in the same room together, even though they
seem to share only one creative soul between them and thus they grudgingly
acknowledge their reluctant codependence? This is especially the case if their
partnership is one that is collectively celebrated by a wide popular audience
that perpetually rewards them for their shared struggle.
During my research travels through this territory, I even encountered the
work of a scientist who claimed to have developed a genetic theory of coupling. He speculated that in every couple-equation there was a genetic predisposition for one person to live more in the future and one to live more in
the past, and that the partnership dynamics proceeded along those fault lines.
He even used impressive Greek names like alpha and beta to designate them.
If anything, we want to unearth the psychological or even spiritual
template that sheds light on creative combat, not just hide behind the blind
innocence of our chromosomes. This is more than a question of conflicts
between mere gender and creativity being played out in partnership, since
some of the collaborative teams are intimate partners and some are not, while
some of the same-gender teams seem to encounter an intimacy even
more harrowing than that of their literally married artistic peers.
It is also not a historical but rather a human phenomenon we need to
explore: pairs of creative partners for whom relating to the other is like relating to another distinct part of themselves, even though such personal interactions are often as painful and claustrophobic as they are productive and
enriching. Theres more to synchronicity than meets the eye.
Thus there exists a shared creative context for these couples who mine their
own shared personal and emotional lives even more dangerously than solitary or independent artists do. The complexities of companionship are also
the origins of otherness, as ably suggested by Whitney Chadwicks and Isabelle De Courtivrons well edited study of intimacy within working partnerships, Significant Others.
This suggests a special category outside the customary parameters of
private and public, individual and couple, a unique territorial category that
I can only refer to as significant otherness: the curious sensation that a
couples music somehow thrives on an edgy proximity that draws them
closer together while simultaneously driving them further apart, while we
look and listen on with glee.
In Shari Benstocks related book, Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern
Marriage, she made a major contribution to investigating such notions of
collaboration by focusing our attention on the partners struggle in search
of fulfillment and self-expression within bonds.2
This domestic equation can be easily expanded to include the often exotic
relationships of creative couples, or professional partners, whose works are
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mutually created and who depend on one another for separate but key ingredients to the success of their artistic enterprise.
The crucial concept of interest to us here is that of creative and artistic selfexpression in pairs, not just the personal struggle for self-expression which
engages all of us, and the key dynamic we need to clarify is that of creativity
within the boundaries of a collaborative professional partnership.
We need to unearth the quantum level of creative partnership, and that
means finding the basic foundational level at which point all of these different sets of creative partners intersect. We also want to uncover the shared
compulsions of the creative pathology that they have in common.
Sorting out the complex balancing act between such mutual muses also
provides a way of separating creative myth from actual artistic practice, of
disentangling the image of the partners from the lives of the players, and
most importantly, of appreciating what Benstock has also called the
uniquely singular achievements within the collaborative process itself.
Another equally important question is posed by the apparent success of
certain creative collaborators who seem to connect with a large audience
and thrive, despite the fact that they reserve a special and significant
contemptuous antipathy for the very person who shares their gifts most
intimately.
Among these ironic survivors are the titanic creative teams propelling
The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Fleetwood Mac, each of which has become
a current corporate entity, a brand name that soldiers on regardless of the
heated hubris of their leaders.
It also helps that the creative partnerships of the couples under consideration each make for a great dramatic story in their own right. Seldom has
comedy melted into tragedy, and back again, so seamlessly as in these iconic
couples. Such teams realize that working together, as distressing as it might
be, is the only means to reaching that obscure magic which is only available
by looking through their partners eyes.
Vincente Todoli once described the creative collaboration between artists
Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth in terms that apply across the board here:
The surprising thing about their partnership was their contradictory personalities, a meeting of opposites. As in physics, poles of the same charge repel
each other and those of the opposite attract each other.3
Artist Richard Hamilton put it well when he reluctantly attested
that Art is a solitary occupation. Creativity in general is the act of an individual. But there are times when the ivory tower is opened to admit a
partner.4
Bands like Fleetwood Mac, The Rolling Stones, The Who, or even cranky
partners such as Simon and Garfunkel, survivors all, seem to realize implicitly that the brand identity they worked so hard and long to create jointly
often prevents them from ever having a private identity separate from their
corporate entities, orpainfully enoughfrom the partner they need in
order to make their work work.
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And how do they just keep on keeping on? Two things: allegiance and
obedience to their successful brand and . . .nobody does it better. The same
factors apply to those other tempestuous teams, Jagger-Richards of The
Stones, and Townshend-Daltrey of The Who. The former team, one of them
now shockingly somehow a Sir, seems quite content to embrace and celebrate
the sheer joy of permanent adolescence.The latter, even burdened with Townshendian personal image problems, will likely be moving into action soon
with a necrophiliac tour containing a taped sample of their dead bass players
licks. Nobody does it better?
Key factors to reflect on are childhood and the dynamics of young friendship. I took a look at the list of creative collaborators toiling in a gifted but
troubled partnership and suddenly noticed that of all these tortured teams,
the ones who still succeed in staying together today, are the ones who have
known each other the longest, some of them literally since their beginnings.
Simon and Garfunkel met when they were 11, Pete Townshend and Roger
Daltrey met when they were 14, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met when they
were 7, Frank Zappa and Don Van Vliet met when they were 15, Lennon and
McCartney met when they were 15, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks
met when they were 18, and Brian Wilson and family met when they were born.
This entire creative and chaotic crew formed their initial bonds together
while they were still practically children, before they had fully formed their
own characters and identities, and in alliance together against a confining
adult society. They each accepted the complex differences between them as
part of the price they paid, first as comrades in arms and then as creative
teams, as they literally grew up together, or didnt grow up at all, as the case
may be. At least in these uniquely youthful teams, that bond has long
outlasted the slings and arrows of their shared outrageous fortunes.
The mysterious dynamic that makes partners different from each other
eventually makes them different from themselves. A profound alienation
emerges, one seemingly associated with what in the West has become a rather
shared obsession: the search for perfect and pure authenticity. Particularly
prevalent in pop music because of its vast scale and influence, this desire for
realness only gets worse when it is doubled by the brilliant teamwork of
collaborators in a partnership.
In pop music we have an example of an experimental framework for
understanding the dynamics between two individuals, and for assessing the
reasons some are so successful at sharing the spotlight, if only temporarily,
while others are so incompatible that they never manage to meld to the
degree necessary for the creation of a joint product such as a great pop song.
Who can properly explain why Mrs. Robinson still kicks ass, for instance?
Or, why Simon and Garfunkels music is so lovely even though they eventually, rather rapidly, just hated making it together.
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Another important factor is a unique theory of conflict resolution called

governing or nonprevalent dynamics. Many people are aware of the
remarkably gifted mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in
the recent movie A Beautiful Mind), but unfortunately he is more famous for
being crazy than for the subtle cognitive concept he was working on.
It sounds more difficult than it really is: nonprevalent dynamics is a theoretical form of resolving two competing forces, whatever they may be, in a
manner where neither one prevails over the other, where no one is a
winner and no one is a loser.
This theory of Nashs seeks a means of moving forward by negotiation and
requires a tacit agreement that the best solution will be one where both parties
win and no one prevails exclusively. In short, it suggests that a psychological
compromise is equally essential for both parties, one that enables the team
itself to thrive rather than one member or the other.
What is the motivation for creative collaborators to engage in such a
compromise? Surprisingly, that motivation is provided by all of us. We want
them to resolve their differences because we want to hear their music, and
we reward them accordingly if they do so to deliver it. Whatever the artistic
discipline and musical style, and however harrowing their personal relationships, these teams of creative collaborators desperately dont want to say
goodbye, they cant say goodbye, even though for most of them, its been a
hard days life!
Imagine turning the lead of your persona, even your very hubris, into the
gold of your legend. Once youve found a way to become a whole person,
by virtue of your ideal alter-ego, your second self, your perfect substitute,
breaking up is indeed hard to do. Collaborators create a dynasty of dissonance, let alone despairsuccessful on the surface, celebrated on the outside,
psychically subservient on the inside, tormented by turmoil beneath.
The factors that make a great singer-songwriter team are exactly the same
as those that make a great solo artist: intuitive insight, inspired innovation,
and incandescent interpretation. And since we live in a future partially visualized and personified by the work of these many gifted but troubled teams
of singer-songwriters, in a curious sense all of us become their collaborators
too. We collaborate with them by deciding who becomes enshrined in history
and exactly what it is for which they will be remembered.
After all, our collective memory is a museum of their dreams.
9
The Seduction Shouters:
John Lennon/Paul McCartney
I'm Looking Through You
Michael Jackson can sell records till the end of time but hell never matter to
people the way The Beatles did. Every record was a shock when it came out.
Compared to rabid r & b enthusiasts like The Rolling Stones, The Beatles arrived
sounding like nothing else. John Lennon and Paul McCartney were exceptional
songwriters. One of the reasons The Beatles had to stop performing? The songs
werent theirs anymore. They were everybodys.1
Elvis Costello
Their music was a seduction aimed at a world in need of a new affair of the
heart. But their seduction had to be shouted at a mass audience that was
louder than the original sung message itself. Those wishing to understand
the curious frenzy swirling around them would do well to pick up a fascinating little book by Nobel-prize-winning author Elias Canetti. In his tome,
Crowds and Power, he abundantly explained the organic and unconscious
nature of the relationship between the desires of crowds on the verge of
becoming mobs, and the power of those who are in the eye of the storm and
are engulfed by the appetites of an abstract mind multiplied by thousands.
John Lennon is an ideal and exemplary symbol for the implicit psychic
dangers of the creative art form of contemporary songwriting under such
circumstances. Telltale examples of The Beatles music penned by Lennon
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effortlessly reveal the secret torment at the heart of his genius and how this
torment made him even more attractive to an audience that needed the nourishment provided by both his inspiring images and his often dark insights
into the limits of popular fame and public identity.
John Lennon was a child of trauma, but he was also the father of a musical
revolution and sadly, one of the first sacrificial victims offered to the savage
god of celebrity . . .the rest, you know. He was also, along with his boyhood
hero Elvis Presley, perhaps a tragic but ideal personification of novelist John
Updikes disturbing image of celebrity: celebrity is a mask that eats into
the face.
McCartney has a totally different form of pathology than Lennon, but only
on the surface. His particular compulsion is to perpetually entertain us, to
soothe us. His half of the amazingly creative team that fueled The Beatles
was also fraught with remarkable insecuritiesthe desire to please and the
anger he somehow managed to sublimate and transform into perpetually
soothing anthems of hopeful happiness and wistful loss. Until Helter
Skelter, of course.
Paul McCartney was likewise a child of trauma, having lost his mother
young, and he experienced the trauma as deeply as did the young Lennon.
There are different ways for all of us to cope with and process our own traumas,
whatever they may be, and John and Paul each responded in drastically divergent ways. And yet, their ways eventually met and intertwined. A good example of this personal convergence and harmonic divergence would be to
examine two different songs on roughly the same subject, such as the McCartney
creation Penny Lane and the Lennon creation Strawberry Fields Forever.
Both songs are about their childhoods, but while one is a lyrical romp
through a kindhearted fantasy world concocted through the generosity of
Paul, the other is a fantastic visit to the real estate of abandonment courtesy
of John. Both are among their best songs. Sometimes I wonder which is the
real world and which is the imagined one. But more importantly, both songs
are made possible through the agency of the other partner, even if one or
the other is officially considered the nominal author of the song. Each of these
superb artists looks through the other, both mirror and window, in order to
marshal their forces to uncommon creative heights. Until, that is, Lennon
decided he didnt want to do that anymoreor that he couldnt.
It is by now a commonplace notion, indeed almost a cliche, that Lennon
believed being with Yoko freed him from himself and from his bandmates:
he clearly felt that they were almost two halves of something and that
together they made up the whole. One wonders why he didnt realize that
the same was true of his creative relationship with McCartney.
Just as Dylan was the gold standard for and apotheosis of the singersongwriter as a solo artist, the singer-songwriting duo at the heart of
The Beatles forms the absolute template of what it means to create music in
tandem. A team so perfect its totemic, so perfect its almost like one person.
On the periodical table of the singer-songwriter elements and their
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relationships to one another, if Dylan is the gold standard with his infamous
long thin mercury sound, then Lennon and McCartney are the rare diamonds
of a given era. Certainly in terms of revolutionary influence alone they are
the equivalent of the Gershwin Brothers and Rogers and Hammerstein
together with Rogers and Hart and Bacharach and David, with all the powerful drugs thrown in for good measure.
Although I enjoy the romance of Costellos reason why The Beatles had to
stop performing, and I agree that the songs did indeed become all of ours,
the actual reasons are far more simple, and far less romantic. First, they grew
up and grew apart, eventually starting to despise the codependency of their
talent and fame; second, they could never hope to adequately perform the
music they had collage-composed in the studio.
Their studio compositions placed them far ahead of their time technologically too. Nowadays music of the most complex colors imaginable can be
presented live with little or no difficulty, but that was not the case when
Lennon and McCartney were performing. Once they stopped performing to
their audience, their days were numbered, and their demise was inevitable.
Of course, the utter vanishing of John Lennons identity down a drain of
drugs and paranoia didnt help matters either.
Even so, the eight years they gave us musically were pretty much irreplaceable and irreproducible, and the shouted seduction they injected into the
worlds suddenly shrinking culture was priceless. Synchronicity was clearly
at work in the lives of these two seemingly star-crossed songwriters.
Lennons voice by itself would have been almost unbearable; its rawness is
rare and requires the ameliorating influence of McCartneys mellow tone.
Lennons was a vocal allure from beyond questions of mere good or bad.
Taste had nothing to do with what he accomplished.
David Stubbs of UNCUT Magazine wrote:
As Ian MacDonald has pointed out, much of it was in his voicethat broad,
grainy, Scouse-inflected yet perfectly pitched voice, bristling with wit, insolence, nave sincerity, pain and love. Bob Dylan can certainly lay claim to
partial credit for the invention of rock and roll attitude, and certainly the
two artists influenced each other. But Dylans voice didnt register anything
like as loudly as Lennons did across the globe. Subsequent artists have all
taken a chip of LennonJohn Lydon amplified his sneer but was unable
to match the remaining spectrum of emotion, Liam Gallagher has recaptured but not surpassed his laryngitic sandpapery edge.2
The two were a match made in heaven and a marriage made in hell.
Lennons relentless self-revelation was so honest, even when it was hidden,
that he seemed to be speaking, and singing, on behalf of everyone. And he
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was both rewarded and cursed accordingly. At least McCartney had the
common sense and good manners to realize they were part of something
bigger than just their own flawed separate personalities: The Beatles are as
mysterious and wonderful to me as they are to everyone else. Probably more
so. The mystery and the magic of it just go on and on.3
In Lennon/McCartney and Lennon/Ono, we encounter the most creatively
intertwined and neurotically overgrown jungle of blinding brilliance and
youthful beauty ever to grace the public popular culture stage. The Beatles
creative core, including the astonishing George Martin, provided the standard of excellence for all groups after them to aspire to, even though it was
crystal clear that no one ever could quite match that towering level of
co-creative exchange. Their secret was a simultaneous set of songwriting
miracles melded with a miraculously powerful drummer and an emotionally
advanced guitarist.
This is my story both humble and true, take it to pieces and mend it with
glue, John Lennon sardonically quipped in his memoir Skywriting by Word of
Mouth; well, 1969 was the year it all unraveled. He took it to pieces for us
before our eyes, of course, so well just have to try and put it back together
again, if only to really appreciate how magnificent it all was before he imagined he had to abandon it. Its all a question of pieces. You see, he was half of
something, whereas Dylan was the whole thing. So, are Lennon and McCartney two Dylans, something inconceivable, or are they each half a Dylan,
which is something truly mystifying?
The young lunatic Lennon, whose uniquely raspy and nasal voice, a voice
so powerful that it transcended normal definitions of what is beautiful,
once pleaded as he sang Is there anybody going to listen to my story, all
about the girl who came to stay was probably shocked to discover that most
of the civilized world was willing to listen to his story.
Until that is, only a mere two years after declaiming Girl on his
revolutionary Rubber Soul, when he innocently tried to communicate across
the expanding chasm of his own scarred celebrity, Shes not a girl who misses
much in his ode to Yoko Ono on the brilliantly doomed The Beatles (aka The
White Album). Thats when he discovered the apparent limits of even his own
form of especially sexy godliness. His original brand suddenly evaporated.
Many diners had big trouble with the new dish on his creative menu, and also
with the new partnership that was looming so large on his horizon.
But to be blunt, although it is now historically clear that Ono was using Lennon,
by then a spaced-out zombie, to her own ends, it is equally clear that he was using
her in order to break his band of boys to pieces, in the only way he knew to do it.
Case closeda case of reciprocal maintenance if ever there was one.
The creative intimacy of Lennon-McCartney, mutual muses and mirrors
par excellence, produced an icon and archetype relationship that changed
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songwriting and popular culture history. The creative intimacy of LennonOno, tortured love-twins caught in their own powerful auras, produced a
surrogate and shadow relationship that cleverly changed with history, in
order to evade its own mythology.
In the end, we all had to carry that weight together. Why, we dont know.
Probably because the gifted Lennons story was so powerful and so tragic,
and likely also because our cultures appetite for the glow of greatness is just
so insatiable, I suppose. This is greatness at its saddest, however. Thats what
is so poignant about the 60s in general and The Beatles in particular: what
started out so happily free, ended up so dismally dark as a result of our
own inability to live up to the utopian hype we all created together. In other
words, reality bit.
By far the most engaging and informative study of The Beatles phenomenon was executed by the late great Ian MacDonald in his 1994 book Revolution
in the Head: The Beatles Records and the Sixties. Its accessibility and clarity is
largely the result of MacDonalds ability to contextualize the Beatles as artists
and social beings. More than enough has already been said about the astronomical stature of these musicians, but it has generally been a treatment of
their talents which cuts them off from those very popular culture roots that
informed their genesis and growth, almost as if they arrived full blown from
another planet ready to awaken the rest of us with their songs.
The beauty of Revolution in the Head is the manner in which it places
The Beatles within a cultural and historical continuum, demonstrating their
greatness largely by examining how they managed to capture the essence of
a deeper social and cultural evolutionary change which was then occurring
in western civilization at large.
The creative intimacy of popular culture, a profoundly magical mirror into
which singer-songwriters pour their pain, and out of which we draw these
emotional emblems for the entertaining enigmas in our lives called songs, is
based on an agreement between the parties. Both artists and audiences know
what ritual is being enacted when a concert or a recording provides a way to
go on living, especially for young people, the primary and primal audience
for which rock n roll music was originally created.
The Beatles, navigated by Johns and Pauls cooperative geniuses, were

clearly surfing a massive wave of energy from the collective unconscious,
energy that surfaced after the war in the shapes of multiple art forms, energy
that made them into legitimate archetypes and unwitting symbols of desire.
As George Harrison so succinctly put it in August 1969, The fans gave us
their money and their screams but we gave them our nervous systems. And
no one gave away more of his nervous system than did Lennon. But his role
as a writer, visual artist, designer, filmmaker and performance artist has been
overshadowed by his obvious greatness as a singer-songwriter.
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And when we examine those strong impulses at his core, so often sugarcoated by the pop machinery, and we glimpse his need to express himself
directly in ways unrelated to audience expectation or satisfaction, we can
arrive at a vantage point where it is very easy to detect both the personal
search which led him to Yoko Ono and the personal pressures which led
him away from The Beatles, especially his incredibly gifted alter-ego songwriting partner, Paul McCartney.
Lennon and McCartney were the content providers as well as the distribution system for an abundance of baby boomer dreams, needs, and appetites.
They offered an ongoing menu of stylistic hipness which was so classy in its
delivery and so overflowing with sheer exuberance that even utterly straight
people were allowed to imagine that they too could be hip.
Lennons brand was largely the concoction of his savant-like manager
Brian Epstein, who was sensitive and smart enough to realize that when he
saw The Beatles, he was witnessing the future. It was this single recognition that makes him at least as important as the other builder of the brand,
the gifted producer George Martin, who was sensitive and smart enough to
assist raw genius in finding its formal manifestation. One built the image,
the other built the sound. Together, they made us weep.
The love affair between a music lover and the artists they most identify with
reveals a secret emotional equation that allows us to calculate the weights
of certain feelings, the temperature of others, the colors of still other sensations. This is, of course, an open secret. Anyone who has ever experienced a
shiver of energy go down his or her spine when some powerful favorite song
comes on knows what the secret tells us about ourselves: who we are, or at
least who we imagine ourselves to be, which might be even more revealing
in the long run.
Pop music is actually all about a secretknowing something others dont
know unless they listen to the same music. Listen. On The Beatles album
Please Please Me (1963), we hear: Ive known a secret for a week or two,
nobody knows, just we two. But another sort of secret also exists at the heart
and core of the most successful musical partnership in history. Im not referring to the kind of secret like John being in love with Paul, though that was
undoubtedly true (wouldnt you be if you were him?). No, the secret is the
other one, the fact that they were really only one person, or rather two halfpeople who truly became what Pete Townshend would later allude to as
quadrophrenic.
It inspired the almost magical alchemy between John Lennon and Paul
McCartney. The same secret exists at the center of the most notorious personal
partnership in pop cultural history. It animates and explains the star-crossed
and storm-tossed romance of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The same secret
fuels the ongoing animus between the remaining members of an astonishingly
fruitful and truly unique lovers triangle, Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono.
As early as the Help! period, Lennon was already suffocating with the
weight of dreams fulfilled, and he was acting accordingly, or acting out
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perhaps. Then, by 1966, when the art of recording replaced the act of performing, his dissatisfaction had reached truly epic proportions, as had his plunge
into his ego-melting medicines of choice.
The closest thing to an autobiography John Lennon ever penned, apart
from the harrowingly beautiful Nowhere Man in 1966 or its updated
versions, Im Losing You and the last gasp of I Dont Want to Face It,
from 1980, was his deceptively simple and exceedingly brave little book,
Skywriting by Word of Mouth.
Released posthumously, it was composed during the five-year period of
seclusion leading up to his departure and has a goon-like spirit similar to that
of his first two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, though
less snappish and mean-spirited than either of these texts written in the first
blush of his astronomical success. What it reveals, in his usual combination
of brutal brilliance and subtle sensitivity, is the strong desire to be an artist
rather than an entertainer, and the unbearable tension that this dichotomy
caused him throughout his life and career. The pain he felt at the worlds reaction to his passionate love affair with the artistic woman he believed to be his
soul mate is also in evidence, a simmering pain embedded between every
vulnerable line he wrote.
For similar reasons, both Paul and Yoko loved and needed the remarkably
gifted but emotionally doomed John Lennon. First, in order to transform the
common base metal of everyday life into the gold of scintillating pop songs
with striking poetic power. Second, to transmute the less lustrous fools gold
that emerged from a somewhat pathological love affair played out on the
world stage.
Lennon was obviously weighed down by the inherent contradictions he felt
in his public role and, paradoxically, he was equally burdened by his creative
contributions to a radical new cultural landscape. His lot was to change
forever the popular structure of music through experiment and innovation
but also to motivate and fuel a massive entertainment machine that inhibits
the free expression of that very innovation itself. So, he was able to start a revolution but was prevented, he thought, from continuing to be a revolutionary.
Recall that Lennon curiously quipped (in Skywriting), This is my story
both humble and true, take it to pieces and mend it with glue. All right then,
we will. Lennon remains a glorious, inspiring, infuriating, and cracked jigsaw
puzzle, all at once. But he is also surrounded by many other equally obscure
and mystifying people-puzzles that also resist a clean assembly. Pauls genius
as a creative counterpart is undeniable, as is the complex puzzle of his own
tenacious personality. But all puzzles tend to pale in comparison to the
chameleon-like Yoko. She shares an intimate connection with the apparently
sanguine McCartney, one which casts doubt on the myths attached to both
of them.
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Lennons internal irony overload and meltdown was contained in that

simmering paradox: how to have everything you ever dreamed about without losing your grip on the identity and personality out of which those
dreams emerged. How could his group be both radically avant-garde and
immensely popular at the same time? It was a case of fulfilled-dream
syndrome, if ever I saw one.
The subplot to this collision of the art and pop worlds is centered on
Lennons unique creative relationships with his musical partners, which
disintegrated prior to and in the wake of Yokos arrival on the pop culture
stage. Lennon moved ever closer to creating a new kind of art with a different
kind of collaborative muse. The key overlapping theme in both plots,
however, was that of the mesmerizing opposing forces of highly combustible
creative collaborations.
As no less a contemporary musical maestro than the great American
composer Aaron Copeland has remarked, If you want to know about the
Sixties, play the music of The Beatles. But although the music of The Beatles
in general, and John Lennons caustic brilliance in particular, has now been
enshrined in popular history and counterculture folklore, the values inherent
in the historic period of the 60s which both produced and reflected his genius
are still quite controversial. Still, the music remains, as enlivening and innovative as ever, and Lennons personal contribution to the cultures forward
momentum is undeniable.
And though his own personal choices remained sacrosanct for him, even
his most lurid mistakes being elevated to the status of a geniuss foibles, he
himself was not as tolerant of the era he so personally helped to manufacture.
MacDonalds Revolution in the Head asks a very pertinent question about the
mirror images of The Beatles and the 60s, wondering how, if their music
was so intimately wedded to the times, it could ever escape the occasionally
plausible criticisms of that period and its heady dreams.
John Lennon was one of the first people to reject and repudiate The Sixties
phenomenon. Talking to Rolling Stone in 1970, he dismissed the preceding
years of social upheaval and countercultural revolt as little more than a
clothes show: Everyone dressed up but nothing changed.4 To Lennon, then
rendered austere by Janovs primal therapy, both the 60s and The Beatles
seemed to have been divorced from reality: middle-class daydreams funded
by unprecedented affluence and fueled by delusive drugs. So, insisted the
therapeutically transformed and almost but not quite detoxified ex-Beatle,
the Dream was over.
Another equally important point to consider is the success of certain
creative collaborators, such as The Beatles, who seem to intimately connect
with the whole world as an audience and thrive doing so, yet they reserve a
special and significant contempt for the very people who share their gifts most
intimately: their songwriting partners. They disdain the very one on whom
they depended in order to be fully complete. This can be witnessed most
clearly in the inescapable facts of personal and professional needs. John
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Lennon was simply unable, after suffering his identity crisis, to ever acknowledge the necessity of Paul McCartney as his crucial partner in this remarkable
alchemy. He could never ever actually say, I need you, to Paul, whereas in
the case of his looming mother-goddess fixation, he could never say anything
else to Yoko but I need you. But eventually, unlike Harrisons plaintive love
song of the same name, Lennons love affair would also include heroin, something obviously even worse for him and his creativity than LSD, the earlier
expansive drug which had melted away his identity in the mid-60s. His pursuit
of oblivion was relentless.
It was this drastic disillusionment of Lennons, fanned by his own creative

insecurities after the beginning of the demise of The Beatles as early as 1965
(coinciding precisely with his discovery of lysergic acid) and thus long before
the advent of Ono, which prompted his radical dismissal of his own rich
history, his band, his success, his influence, and even his own identity.
He was desperately searching for a way to reembrace an edginess in his work
and beliefs that he associated with his proper birthright as an experimental
artist (as he pondered: how could a truly dangerous and radical artist ever
be so phenomenally successful from a purely commercial point of view?).
In this passionate need to reassert that edginess, he was completely certain
that his new love affair provided a way out of the morass of comfort food
his own vital poetry had become.
The discrepancy between his own fear and mistrust of the avant-garde and
the profoundly avant-garde aspects of his own musical appetites has often
been remarked upon. It spotlights not only his own wobbly sense of self but
also the key differences between himself and his youthful songwriting partner, who was apparently considerably more comfortable at first with broad
experimentation. It also focuses on the differences between their own unique
teamwork and nearly everyone and everything else in that period of popular
culture.
The precious music of The Beatles, forged in the nearly supernatural merging of the sarcastic rage and profound insecurities of John Lennon with the
sweet optimism and emotional self-control of Paul McCartney, remains inexplicable in its fresh energy and appeal to human hopes, even today. Todays
mega-pop groups such as Oasis, Blur, and U2 are but pale imitators.
Clearly, Paul was able to utilize the maniacally raging John as a surrogate
of sorts, traveling through him to an edge he could never reach alone, while
John must have likewise benefited by using Paul as a surrogate for tender
human feelings otherwise inaccessible to him. There was a surprising
discrepancy between Johns and Pauls own personal appreciation for the
artistic edge, considering how truly trailblazing Lennons vision was and
how conventional, though brilliantly conventional, McCartneys vision was
and remains to this day.
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In Revolution in the Head, MacDonald characterizes their curious amalgam

as a classic clash between truth and beauty.
Reflecting his sedentary, ironic personality, Lennons melodies tend to move
up and down as little as possible, weaving deviously through their harmonies in chains of repeated notes. Basically a realist, he instinctively kept his
melodies close to the rhythms and cadences of speech, coloring his lyrics
with bluesy tone and harmony rather than creating tunes that made striking
shapes of their own. McCartneys lines by contrast display his extrovert
energy and optimism, ranging freely across the stave in scaled steps and
wide intervals, often encompassing more than an octave. His is the creation
of the natural melodist, a creator of tunes capable of existing apart from their
harmonywhereas Lennons lines tend to be allusive, moody affairs which
make sense only when accompanied, particularly the more chromatic
creations of his later style.
McCartneys method is, in terms of intervals, vertical (melodic, consonant) and Lennons is horizontal (harmonic, dissonant). Seeing music as
a vehicle for thought and feeling, Lennon stressed expression at the expense
of formal elegance, which held not interest or value for him per se. Intuitive,
he cared little for technique and nothing for the rules, which he would go out
of his way to break.5
But soon Lennon would court disaster: by abandoning the boys, by

embracing a radical art chick from the future, by trying so desperately to
purge himself of his success, or at least to top it somehow, he would break
one rule too many for their and our liking. He, whose fragile personality
buckled under the weight of drastic consciousness expansion, and whose
identity was literally burned away under the constant torrent of acid
he poured into his gifted brain, was desperately looking for a way out.
Lennon was a mere shadow of his former self. Unfortunately, however, in
order to save him, Yoko Ono somehow needed to become, not just his muse,
but also his lost mother.
In Dave Stubbss profile for UNCUT, the vulnerable Lennon was described as
still bleeding from ancient wounds, Lennon took solace not just in a bad
drugs habit, but in Yoko. . .Lennon retreated into a world of drugs, dreams
and diaries . . .such a withdrawal elicited comparisons with Howard
Hughes . . .while Lennon wanted peace for mankind, deep down he did
not want peace in his own life, or rather, he was incapable of enjoying it.6
And now, both Sir Paul and Queen Yoko are the colegislators of a brilliant
and beautiful legacy hammered together out of the white-hot competitive
codependence of these two polar opposites.
The 1998 rerelease of the so-called Let it Be. . .Naked original sessions from
1969, minus the Spector-drenched wallowing waterfall of sound, is a clear
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indication of Pauls ongoing compulsion with getting back to his roots in a

revisionist manner. As is Onos simultaneous release of The John Lennon
Anthology box set, her own personal compulsions being evident in her
perpetual tending to the garden of Lennons memory.
Unfortunately for Paul, his powerfully creative and muse-like connection
with John is all the more obvious today, when one recognizes that all of his
post-Lennon music, while being perfectly crafted and very popular, is about
as compelling as traveling in a cozy elevator. I do agree, however reluctantly,
that it is indeed exquisitely beautiful elevator music. In contrast, Lennons
astonishing collaborations with McCartney seem to be perpetually futuristic
and fresh beyond measure.
In the case of those rare examples of truly scintillating visionaries, such as
Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Brian Wilson, in their evocative and emotional
art they seemed to show us a future that we are still living in, perhaps one
that hasnt even arrived yet.
Ironically enough, it was the avuncular Swiss psychologist Carl Jung,

someone who had his very own love-hate, master-muse relationship with
mentor Sigmund Freud, who provides some of the most instructive explanations for the intriguing phenomenon of dynamic creative duos. He left us
several useful blueprints for what amounts to a comparative morphology of
totems.
He put forth salient and seminal insights such as synchronicity, that
destiny-drenched confluence of circumstances and temperaments that
permits dynamic partnerships. He described the archetypes of the collective
unconscious, that tantalizing template for the looming shapes these celebrated
creators assume in all our lives. He presented his principle of psychological
types, that cunningly balanced centrifugal force that binds an extreme introvert to an extreme extrovert and allows a pair of partial people to harmonize
together into an archetypal myth.
Uncle Carl apparently had more than a few canny insights into at least
some of the mysterious alchemy at work here. Imagine, something as deceptively simple as his introvert-extrovert equation (translation: the question of
whether we project our libidinous energy outward towards the objective
world of objects and people or inward towards the subjective world of
thoughts and ideas) shedding light on something as complex as these
combustible creative partnerships and the effect their accomplishments have
on our collective consciousness.
These partnerships are all searchers on a quest for the holy grail of
Lennons and McCartneys kind of partnership, and even Lennons and
Onos unearthly level of shared creativity. All other partnerships can be
measured against the superlative merging of creative minds at work in the
band from Liverpool. The Beatles, in general, as a creative unit of mutant
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musical magic, and Lennon and McCartney, in particular, as two halves of a

significant whole best experienced together, are emblems of sterling shared
talent at its most intense. Today they still provide the ideal lens through
which to understand and appreciate one of the principal themes of this book.
Both of the late Lennons ex-partners, the Superbowl-safe McCartney and
the permanently enigmatic Ono, are still embroiled in their collaborative
turmoil, and they are fully expected to make serious investment bids on the
financially troubled Michael Jackson horde of musical rights to about 250
Beatles songseach for their own perfectly justifiable reasons.
Life is what happens to you while youre busy making other plans,7 John
Lennon once cavalierly joked, in the usual off-the-cuff manner that often
belied the profound truths hidden beneath his vulnerable and humorous
armor.
Few people he encountered would ever catch a glimpse of the soft soul
crushed under that hard shell. The two people who did both feel it and fully
appreciate it would later become his first songwriting partner and his second
wife. It gives the term love triangle a whole new meaning.
And today, Sir Paul keeps on keeping on, and keeps on trying to get
back, as he tells us in his latest single, from last years album of the same
name, Ever Present Past. This pervasive sense of what is gone drives him to
question the reality of those times, and hope theres something to find,
in that vague history that has gone so fast, and that once seemed to be eternally guaranteed.
No sarcastic remarks here about his current level of songwriting, just a
wistful sigh in recognition of how much we all miss John Lennon. And no
one misses him more than whats left of Paul McCartney.
10
The Party Givers:
Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
Beasts of Burden
The acceptance of Jaggers voice on pop radio was a turning point for rock and
roll. He broke open the door for everybody else. It was completely unique: a white
performer doing it in a black way. There were no other white boys doing this.
White singers stood there and sang, like The Beatles. Not being in control: thats
what Mick Jagger was communicating.1
Steve Van Zandt
The Rolling Stones were often referred to as the Anti-Beatles, and, of course,
stylistically they were. But they were also the anti-fabs in another way, a more
emphatic way which has allowed them to survive and thrive where their
magnificent peers could not. They somehow knew, early on, that rock n roll,
apart from being a lifestyle, was also a business, a big corporate business. They
never shunned the fact that they were in the business of satisfying desire.
Money mattered, and it wasnt the root of all evil, it was just the root of them.
No one else writes in the personally-propelled style of these two great 60s
titans, each one composing his own vision but also sharing it with the stylistic
voice of his partner in a highly combustible relationship. The relationship has
lasted more than 40 years and is still fueled by the same emotional ingredients
and individual compulsions that gave birth to a perpetual inability to get no
satisfaction.
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The obvious reason they were able to outlast and outplay their great rivals,
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, is really twofold. First, they were fully aware
of how much they needed each other in order to accomplish their
mission, and they were ready to make the necessary compromises to do so.
Second, they fully realized the sordid fact that music is about entertainment,
no matter how much we tend to be transported by its tangible transcendental
qualities.
Both groups also had a Svengali-like packaging genius to guide them
through their early days, Brian Epstein for the Fabs and Andrew Loog Oldham
for the Dregs. Oldham all but manufactured the madness surrounding Jagger
and Richards, especially when it came to the ascent and conquering of
America.
Arriving stateside only four months after The Beatles arrived, The Rolling
Stones, not yet the global entity we know as The Stones, were not so much
made by America, like The Beatles, they were literally made in America, like
a brilliant product which no one knew we really desperately needed. They
became American, and subsequently global, by totally accepting the roots of
the music which had so inspired them as reckless youths.
And what raw youths they were. Mike Jagger and Keef Richards were
childhood neighbors and first became school chums, then gang chums, then
musical cult chums, and finally, songwriting chums.
The similarities between the two competing groups were always stronger
than their differences, apart from the obvious surface details. The Stones
managed to remain exactly as they were, exactly as raunchy as The Beatles
had been in the sweaty, amphetamine-drenched bars of Hamburg before
becoming global stars. The Stones maintained their grip on their grit, in an
almost maniacal and compulsive manner.
The Beatles had been performing at a fever pitch in Germany, clad in black
leather, snarling sexuality and rage, and they would commence doing something vaguely similar at the famous Cavern back in England, but they would
quickly be redesigned by the brilliant Epstein, whose personal vision and lifestyle focused on their latent homoerotic energies.Once he stuffed them into
those cute suits, however, the paradox of the power contained and the energy
released was so perfectly balanced, in an off-kilter kind of way, that the world
literally went quite bonkers for his boys. Epstein was a primitive fey genius!
The Stones, by contrast, held on to that same dark frenzy as if it were their
own, and indeed it was: they were about to make being a wicked alternative
to The Beatles into a lifelong business venture, one that left their early
competitive mates in the dust of trying to change the world.
The Stones didnt want to change the world, they wanted to own it, and
now, at least in terms of being the sole rock legend currently operating at an
intense level, they still do. No one else but The Who managed to inject as much
fury, lust, and wealth into the search for psychological bliss and oblivion.
The two gifted impresarios who basically invented both The Beatles and
The Stones, Epstein and Oldham, respectively, both took their groups into
The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards
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an arena where they commanded ultimate respect, but each were respected
for different reasons.
The Beatles were Olympian because they gave everyone what they wanted,
a vision of the world wrapped in sparkling joy; The Stones were Olympian
because they gave everyone else what they needed, a snapshot of the world
as an endless party designed to satisfy every appetite, no matter how sordid.
And one other similarity, a sad and wistful one, bound and binds them
together historically: the leaders of each group, Lennon and Richards, sank
into a self-induced vegetative state due to overzealous indulgence in the
psychic vitamins of the 1960s. In both cases, the bands had to be redirected
by a collaborative partner, McCartney and Jagger, who each took control of
his group once his partner was so out of it that reliable creative or business
decisions were out of the question.
In both instances, the angst that resulted from the nominal leaders dethronement threatened to destroy the perfectly balanced dynamics of the partnerships.
For The Beatles, that angst succeeded in doing so, with Lennon continuing to
strip himself of every shred of personal identity until he ended up a ghost in
the Dakota in New York, psychologically dead long before his actual murder.
With The Stones, however, even though Keith Richards had sadly and literally turned into the late Brian Jones, acting out the wasted wretch role for the
next four decades, something inside him, and even more importantly, something inside of Jagger, prevented them from going down in the same selfindulgent ego flames that engulfed their great competitors.
Johns group lasted eight years, during which the group changed music
and culture on a grand scale. Keiths group lasted five times that long, reinventing several times the black music the group had inherited, and living
on a grand scale unimagined by even the most successful of its peers.
Only Fleetwood Mac managed to survive the 1960s so profoundly, morphing,

like The Stones into a successively evolving institution, which, in Macs case at
least, led the group from being a British Blues band to an American progressive
rock band, and finally, to a Californian pop band of supreme sophistication and
equivalent commercial success.
But The Stones did it without ever really softening their style, as The
Beatles did originally, or mutating it, as Mick Fleetwood continues to do,
but rather by digging deeper into the guts of what makes them who they
really were and are. They did it through writing their lives while living it, just
as all the best songwriters always do.
Since this is a chronicle about the dark mirror reflecting the pathologies that
make for great songs, and because some of those songs can only be born from
the doubled-head of two partners, we need to devote special attention to the
near mystical relationship between songwriting partners who complement
and complete each other, as well as contradict and compete with each other.
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The result of their shared spirit is that shiny but scary raw material we are all
looking for: a perfect song. Songs like Highway 61, God Only Knows,
Urge for Going, Young Americans, Hang On St. Christopher,
Shipbuilding, Im Only Sleeping, or Gimme Shelter.
Great songs tumble like dice out of the clenched and dented imaginations
of their makers, whether alone or writing eyeball to eyeball. McCartneys
Yesterday and Richardss Satisfaction were both written off the cuff in a
semi-conscious state of near-slumber, from which their messengers suddenly
emerged with the riff. Then it was back to bed and blank oblivion, the only
safe and secure place for either a Beatle or a Stone.
Though Lennon and McCartney were the holy grail of contemporary
singer-songwriters in a partnership, just as Dylan was and still is the highwater mark for doing it solo, no template can adequately explain the magic
itself. Not even the songwriters themselves really know where these things
come from. If I knew where the good songs come from, Leonard Cohen
once remarked, Id go there more often. Its a mysterious condition.
Its much like the life of a Catholic nun. Youre married to a mystery.2
Paul Zollo, author of Songwriters on Songwriting and himself a practitioner
of the dark craft, put it this way,
Through the years, Ive hoped to find some formula, some trick or method,
that would make songwriting simple. But there is none. Unlike magicians
who create the illusion of magic, writing a song is genuine magic, miraculous
even to those making the miracles. Most songwriters are in awe of the great
songs that came through them, and not one can offer an easy answer as to
how they do it because there are no easy answers. Thats what makes it so
attractive, Bob Dylan said, theres no rhyme or reason to it, theres no rule.3
But still, it is a game of sorts, and all games have rules. As usual, Mr. Dylan
was being horrifyingly oversimplistic, which is what he does so well, reducing everything to a few glittering kernels in the palm of your hand. If there
were no rules, then we would have no way of according a masterpiece such
as Like a Rolling Stone the proper worship it truly deserves. We wouldnt
be able to recognize what makes Drive My Car, Paperback Writer, or
Sympathy for the Devil so magnificent. So, there may not be any rules for
making magic, but there sure are plenty of them for appreciating it.
For Zollo, both a maker and an appreciator, the confirmational aspect of
appreciating great songs is tied to the realization that at bottom,
These songwriters, all of whom have created extraordinary work, are
regular folks who dwell in our ordinary world. And its a peculiar kind
of realization, because their songs are infinite and eternaleverywhere
at onceuntouched by time.
Yet the songwriters themselves are as finite and earthbound as the rest of
us. It underscores the knowledge that all songwriters are in the same boat,
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and that even the most enduring and magical of their songs began where all
songs beginwith a single spark of inspiration that is balanced with the
mastery of craft that comes from years of work.4
In their four most creatively realized and idiosyncratically perfect

albums, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street,
The Stones literally invented the location where rock n roll turns into rock
music. In their three best albums of sheer male mayhem and magnificently
raunchy mysticism, Aftermath, Between the Buttons, and Their Satanic Majesties Request, they abandoned all constraint and made themselves into a
mythical monster that would be able to survive, against all odds, for nearly
half a century.
As usual, the founder and still nominal leader of the group, Keith Richards,
said it best:
Wed somehow turned into a bete noir for the British establishment.
And they really pulled all their big guns on us. But you cant keep a good
man down. I really felt that the establishment was out to split up The Stones.
They realized that theyd buttered up The Beatles too much and that they
couldnt hit them because theyd given them medals. Right? So we were
obviously the ones they hit on. We were the flavor of the year for several
years actually. Not that we didnt ask for it in some ways.5
Whereas The Beatles, utilizing a rare gift that has yet to be equaled, seemed
to peel off perfect songs relentlessly, The Stones composers had to rip the
material out of their insides. They literally had to be locked in a room together
by Loog Oldham in order to get their first original song out of them. But when
it did surface, As Tears Go By became a clear indication of the competitive
creative spirit at work between Richards and Jagger.
Though their work came with some degree of difficulty attached, it did
have some unique qualities that set the songwriters apart from their peers in
a clear and dangerous manner. For one thing, they avoided the use of
anything metaphorical in their messages, eschewing any kind of euphemism
for what they were really saying.
When The Stones sang I want to be your lover baby, I want to be your
man, in a song bestowed upon them by John and Paul in a moment of early
communal sharing (I Want to Be Your Man), no one had to wonder what
they meant. From the beginning, they told it like it was, like it is, to successive
generations of mostly young males who needed a place to store all of their
angry lust and youthful bravado. So they stored it in the warehouse known
as the glimmer twins, Richards and Jagger.
Like John and Paul, they were pals from childhood, and also like them they
styled their intimacy and closeness on the model of brothers who can fight
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each other passionately while managing to commit themselves with equal

passion to their mission: world domination. Or at least domination of the
musical world, where they have rested on an ever-increasing pile of laurels
for a longer time than any one of us ever thought possible.
One critic recently bravely inquired as to the obvious: How do you
respond to those critics who say The Stones should have had the decency to
pack it in long ago? He received the following ideal response from Richards:
Since nobody has sailed this sea before, one expects some storms and some
choppy waters. Why were still here is simply because we love what we do
and theres loads of people out there who want to see it. When it comes down
to it, thats really all it is. It would be easy for me to give up and say I cant be
bothered to be sniped at any more about wrinkly rockers and all of that.
But then what do the critics know? Theyve never been on this sea before
and neither have we. Were just floating out there and seeing where it can go.6
Wait a minute, The Stones and decency in the same question? What do critics know, indeed? What they should know, at least, is that Richards is making
a very telling point. The fact is that rock music is almost the same age as
The Stones are. It started in 1956, and five years later, The Stones had
mastered its morphing styles and made them their own. The true experiment
here is not one of corporate greed at all, but rather the option of treating rock
music with the same veneration as senior players in any other musical style.
We all accepted the fact that Duke Ellington played jazz until he couldnt
stand up anymore, and Muddy Waters, a personal icon for Richards, was still
playing blues long after he could walk properly. The Stones are asking us all a
simple question by their longevity: yes, we know that rock is about youthful
rebellion, but isnt it just possible that its really more about rebellion in
general?
And to the same critic who asked the decency question, Richards answered
a question as to what was the best thing about being 60, with exactly the same
degree of brutal honesty: The fact that people still dig what I do, which gives
me the licence to carry on being myself.7
In other words, its us, all of us, who give him permission to do what
he continues doing so well. We are the ones who want to see just how far
he can go, especially since hes already gone all the way in the first place.
He went all the way with his first big hit, Satisfaction, ages ago. As Loog
Oldham, The Stones early mentor and manager said so long ago, How to
keep the dream alive? Keep it moving!8
He also described the kind of camaraderie that keeps a cult like The Stones
in functioning order, quite apart from the special brain vitamins they
consumed like candy in order to inspire more creativity. We would talk ourselves into the bravura of protective armor wed need to wear to confront
those in our way. We can change the world, was the mantra of the day, the
universal law and order would come later.9 But, of course, the new order
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never did arrivethe world remained unchanged; it was just better entertained by the majesty of both their excess and their success.
Soon enough, as Oldham famously put it, A thirsty evil was starting to
permeate our proceedings.10 It always does. It happened to The Beatles
on a grand scale, just as it happens to everyone the public anoints in a like
manner. The Stones were just gutsy enough to put up with it, not only longer
than anyone else (perhaps with the exception of The Who), but also with
greater stage grace and emotionally manipulative skills.
For Pete Townshend, another of the great dark mirrors trapped in a volatile
creative partnership made in hell (with Roger Daltrey), the distinctions that
made The Stones unique were perfectly clear. He declared:
The Beatles were very remote as people. They were already huge cumbersome stars. I used to think The Beatles were very old fashioned, even when
they were new. Thats how it seemed. Because The Stones built the wall,
they couldnt see it as clearly as we would, The Who, or Small Faces. I think
that The Stones also could not see that theyd built it and The Beatles hadnt.
The rules were laid down: you do not sing about fucking love, you dont do
it, you dont sing soppy love songs. That was just ruled out.11
Living the life you sang about suddenly became more important than longing for the life you loved, and it was Oldhams early influence on The Stones
that prepared them for their longevity, and for a life of authentically raw rock
sensibility. Thats why he remains so important historically, long after
The Stones left him behind to become corporate monsters.
Alan McGee, the head of Creation Records, along with Immediate, one of
the first independent record labels, got it right when he said,
If all Mr. Oldham had ever done in this life was to bring to stardom The
Rolling Stones, that would be enough in itself to merit an award of some
kind. But in reality we are looking at someone who did nothing less than
originate the pop life as we live it. Not many people fundamentally changed
the rules of the world they work in. Heres to one who did.12
The band he pulled together and pointed in their current direction some
four decades ago continues to perpetuate the climate of radical change in
which they themselves were born, even though that wistful utopian illusion
was actually over by late 1968.
Quite simply, Oldham said in his memoirs,
I personally feel that The Rolling Stones are the worlds best rock n roll
band. Mick wants to do new things. He would much prefer to be David
Bowie than have to work with Keith Richards, because when he makes a
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record now he has to deal with the fact that Keith Richards wants to be like
Muddy Waters and grow old and die playing the blues.13
What keeps them together is knowing that they can never function properly apart, that and the fact that what doesnt kill them definitely makes them
stronger. But stronger than what? Well, since the crux of most creative collaborations and partnership collapses is egomania and the denial of mutual
need, apparently The Rolling Stones have proven to be far stronger than
The Beatles. Stronger than dirt.
The Beatles were larger than life, but for more than 40 years, The Stones
have been stronger than death.
11
The Pretension Wreckers:
Pete Townshend/Roger Daltrey
Can You See the Real Me?
The Who began as a spectacle. They became spectacular. They asked, what were
the limits of rock and roll? Could the power of music actually change the way you
feel? The songwriter-listener relationship grows deeper after all the years.1
Eddie Vedder
Things had gotten pretty fancy in the world of pop music, things had become
a lot more serious than its progenitors Little Richard, Chuck Berry and
Elvis Presleyhad probably ever intended. Things had gotten out of hand.
Someone had to come in and return to the roots, to shake up the party and
storm the pretentious castle. But this being rock, they had to do it in an even
more bombastic and outrageous fashion than the very stylistic inflation they
were trying to wreck.
Hidden behind blue eyes, the novel mind of Pete Townshend produces
marvelous lyrics that apparently can only be properly interpreted and delivered by his longtime performing companion, Roger Daltrey, his surrogate
and emblem. The ongoing history of The Who is one of ultimately dangerous
mindsets, which nonetheless sums up many of the insecurities, fears, and
foibles of the average listener, reflected through the performer. How they
manage to do this is the subject of a chapter that will take a cold, hard look at
whether Townshend is a fully functioning creative artist or a dysfunctional
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emotional wreck who succeeds in hiding his troubled torment behind the
power and voltage of his bands musical ventures. Or perhaps, both?
There is a definite inkling that of all the singer-songwriters under examination, Pete Townshend, who after all is The Who, or rather they are his living
surrogates for self-expression, is probably the dark mirror par excellence.
In him we see the most unconcealed and unvarnished examples of the pathology of this kind of self-referential singer, songwriter, and artist.
In him we see the living entity once called by Edgar Allan Poe, the imp of
the perverse, the spirit deep inside that advises us to do the very thing that is
often against our own best interests. And for all of us, that imp is somewhat
different, if equally self-destructive.
When his intriguing but jumbled project called Lifehouse collapsed in 1970,
under exactly the same circumstances that caused Brian Wilsons Smile
project to fall apart in 1967 (namely, the fact that their bandmates simply
could not understand the striking new direction these artists were attempting
to formulate for the experimental phase of their brands), Townshend
revamped the material in order to launch the ideas in the more trusted format
of a straightforward rock record.
The result, Whos Next, remains a masterpiece of Who purity, containing
some of their finest anthems, whereas Wilson imploded and retreated to his
bedroom for years, leaving The Beach Boys to cobble together ersatz Smile
fragments over three subsequent recordings. Townshend has a similar
vulnerable and fragile self-image, but it is encased in a brilliantly sharp and
brittle armor that could not be broken or dented by the mere lack of comprehension of his band. It was, however, severely scratched, and that led to a
further disintegration of an already volatile working collaboration with all
concernedespecially Roger Daltrey.
After Live at Leeds, possibly the greatest live rock record in history,
he reformulated his pattern again, this time exploring the very disintegration
of his band through the dazzling template of his double record Quadrophenia,
an even more daring sonic experiment than his more famous Tommy
opera.
Quadrophenia documented the dissolution of his band, of all bands, with
exactly the same rigor as did The Beatles White Album, except The Beatles
were doing it unconsciously, making four different records disguised as a
group release. Townshend and The Who, however, disguised nothing; they
never did, since it was their task to counterbalance the profound sanctity that
had grown up around rock music and to return it to its nastier, grittier, and
louder roots.
Whos Next is about the way music works, and how an audience is ostensibly there to see a band but really there to see itself.2 This is one of the best
unconscious descriptions of what it means to be a dark mirror, to mine your
own misery, and occasionally your own bliss, for the emotional raw material
of your songs.
The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/Roger Daltrey
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Its been the same through Townshends and his band members careers,
although often camouflaged by the intricate and ornate structures Townshend builds to protect his own vulnerable pathologies:
If you look at The Whos history its easy to forget that we started with
I Cant Explain, which was a desperate copy of The Kinks. The Kinks
were just spectacularly brilliant. People in America talk about The Beatles,
The Stones, The Who. For me, its The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks.3
Seldom is a genius quite so modest as this, especially in rock music, not an

industry known for sharing glory.
But from the very beginning, under the tutelage of the visionary Kit
Lambert, The Whos own Brian Epstein and Andrew Loog Oldham, Townshend knew that their vital role was also a crucial one if rock was to not only
survive but evolve. As Townshend himself put it, He [Lambert] knew there
were pretensions to be broken. 4 And wreck those pretensions they did,
along with their instruments and amplifiers as well, just for good
measure, in case any in the audience were too out of it to notice their musical
mission statement.
Once Townshend and Daltrey had clearly established their grasp of

the angry young sound of pop art in motion, they also defined the age in
which they were living. But with their own aging, as well as the corporate
rock culture that developed around them (and The Stones), even their
personal dynamics have softened somewhat. Well, a lot actually, considering
the roots of their rage towards each other.
UNCUT Magazine captured its essence a couple of years ago when it examined the fact that these two just cannot stop, either fighting or creating together.
One thing quickly becomes clear: Roger Daltrey, for years Townshends foil
and combatant in The Who, and once famously referred to by Pete as the
little cunt, is these days the object of nothing but praise. Since they first
played together as The Detours in 1962, the friction between the two men
has driven the group, and their polarized personalitiesRoger, the
non-nonsense Sherpards Bush hardman, Pete, the free-thinking art
studenthave punctuated virtually every chapter in The Whos story with
off-stage rows, songs, money, drugs, direction, leadership.5
Today, with their two key musical mates dead and gone but they
themselves unable to stop their creative pattern, Endless Wire is their latest
outing. But at this late date, even some of their own diehard fans are starting
to wonder what makes them carry on as they delve deeper and deeper into a
dimly lit dead-end street of personal hubris and professional exorcism.
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One correspondent even used unusually caustic but highly insightful

language to describe his own distaste for the bottomless well of Townshends
suffering in public. Keith Rodway wrote to Mojo to express his incisive
displeasure in these terms:
Having lived with the new Who album for just under a week, Ive reached the
conclusion that the world no longer needs to hear from Pete Townshend, as
his world-view has become micro-solipsistic to the point that hes incapable
of writing about anything but himself. And frankly, what Pete does, thinks
or writes, is irrelevant to a world that has, in the 24 years since The Whos last
album, or more importantly, 33 years since their last good album, simply
moved on. Moreover, the fact that it sounds like The Who smacks of a
marketable merchandise rather than the natural work of an artistic mind.
The Who were great in their day. This is not their day. The Who are a
monument to the past, but no longer a vital force capable of changing the
world. But lets not pretend that it means anything to anyone but Pete
himself, and diehard Who completists. If he has anything to say about the
world as it exists beyond his own self, lets hear it.6
But Rodway is forgetting two important things about the dark mirror
phenomenon of singer-songwriters in general, all of the singer-songwriters in
this book for instance, and about Pete Townshend in particular, whether young
or old. First, the early music of all of the brilliant geniuses in question, but especially of The Beatles, The Stones, and The Who partnerships (and also the
gargantuanly gifted Mr. Dylan), only sounded like it was changing the world.
The world did not exactly change so much as morph into where it was headed
all along. The artists did, however, provide the soundtrack to the movie we all
watched and thought or imagined was capable of changing the world.
Second, the danger of solipsism, the notion that only the self exists or can be
proven to exist, is one of the inherent and key occupational hazards of being a
dark mirror in the first place, whether as a solo artist or in a partnership. Solo
ipsis, from the Greek, is the great challenge facing all those who go down into
the mining shaft to retrieve the raw ore that we mine into our precious little
gems and jewels: songs that articulate our own feelings.
But whose perspective, other than solely their own, do we honestly expect
our singer-songwriters to use? That, after all, is what draws us to themthe
fact that they can craft beauty out of their own plight.
The Whos music, and all of Townshends private creative output as well
(almost as impressive), was always only about them, and him. We only
dreamed that they were speaking to and for and about us. We mistook the
reflections in their mirrors for our own faces, largely because they do their
job of projection so perfectly well.
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Daltrey once astutely referred to what they do together as musical

wrestling, and thats still the best description Ive ever heard of the process
that they shared with the almost combative partners in their peer bands,
The Beatles and The Stones. And this doesnt mention the many other
creative marriages made in hell well cover through charting this tempestuous territory.
The Whos turbulent history: its a tale of triumph, disappointment,
betrayal, failed technology, mental instabilityand mounting tensions
between Townshend and singer Daltrey which erupted into arguably the
most celebrated fistfight in rock n roll,7 declared Pat Gilbert in Mojo Magazine. And after yet another Townshend reunion with his iconic front man,
Keith Rodway observed in UNCUT: Fans will be intrigued by the revelation
that the pair are bickering just like they did in the old days. Lets just say we
dont please each other all the time says Daltrey. Also adding the crux to their
credo, He is able to get inside of my head and I get inside his.8
This last line illustrates why creative collaborators who form lasting and
iconic partnerships cant do it with anyone else, and why they feel so trapped
and doomed by that intimate bond. They want to be solo artists, or at least to
do what they do with someone else, anyone else sometimes, but they cantit
just doesnt work that way. Lennon without McCartney is a viciously sarcastic
moaner; McCartney without Lennon is a sappy sentimentalist. Together,
theyre the greatest songwriting team in history.
The same goes for the others, with varying degrees of the same stylistic proviso: Richards and Jagger, Simon and Garfunkel, John and Taupin, and so many,
many others. Once the chemical compound of opposites is taken apart, nothing
existsthe magic has vanished before our eyes, and of course, our ears.
Ben Ratliff of the New York Times was underwhelmed by one of The Whos
many perpetual reunions back in 2004 at Madison Square Gardens:
Mr. Townshend and Mr. Daltrey could be writing more new songs, but this
band has been breaking up, each time theoretically for good, since drummer
Keith Moon died in 1978. They could change their sound, or find new
stimuli, or be more elegant and stop publicly calling it quits. But having
problems with being in a rock band has always been The Whos chemistry.9
Actually, thats the chemistry of all dark mirrors everywherehaving to do

what they dont want to do, but have to do, because no one else but them
can do it. Besides, we wont let them stop, because if theyre too old to rock,
then were too old to roll!
When Sean OHagan interviewed Townshend around the time of his dire
and distressing dalliance with Internet child pornography, he summed up
his stance regarding Townshends invulnerable importance perfectly, after
carefully navigating around Townshends notoriously brittle exterior:
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The Who, you see, were not just an ordinary pop group. They were one of
the select few who changed the way a generation, and every ensuing generation, looked at the world. In England, as Townshend has often said, they
were a reaction against the stultifying conservatism of the times and against
what he calls that whole sense of postwar denial.
Unlike The Beatles, who were lovable, and The Stones, who were sexual,
The Who were simply fucked up and angry. Their music evinced aggression
and frustration, and spoke of a deep and violent sense of impatience with
the old order. And, they were Mods: modernists who merged terrace hooliganism with art school attitude.
Long before punks stole their stance, The Who, and Pete Townshend in
particular, seemed both supremely bored and effortlessly provocative.
He didnt pen silly love songs about being 64; he said what he felt about a
world run by people who seemed suddenly to be old and in the way.10
Like most of the talented titans who rose to the top of the heap during this
upheaval period, Townshend has often eschewed the very format that got
him there and lamented the lack of ongoing inspiration available through
the vehicle that he himself invented. This is what leads him to make provocative statements like his recent comments about certain famous Who songs
that have been licensed to television. He has declared, in fact, that he would
much rather sell his songs to the varied CSI mystery franchises, rather than
ever have to perform those fing Who songs again. As if we would ever
believe that, when the evidence is so much to the contrary.
But his disingenuous statements bring up a valuable point: just how do
such raucous and revolutionary songs become morphed into the themes for
highly commercial television fodder, which on the surface at least are operating in the opposite direction from the insights that fuel them? The same way
we suppose, that Beatles, Stones, and Dylan songs have been co-opted to sell
everything from cars to shoes. Everything dangerous eventually becomes
safe, or at least safely dangerous.
Thus, the original CSI program used Who Are You, the song from the
album of the same name which was the last gasp of the great drummer Keith
Moon back in 1978. Who are you, who who, who who? But then, of course,
that program had no use for the rest of this interesting song that had lines
such as, I spit out like a sewer hole, yet still receive your kiss, how can
I measure up to anyone now, after such a love as this?
For the CSI: NY version of the series, a classic song from Whos Next was
given the same opening theme treatment, the mysteriously magical Baba
OReilly: The exodus is here, the happy ones are near, lets get together,
before we get much older. Teenage wasteland, theyre all wasted!
The shows theme song eliminates the most compelling parts of the
songs lyrics. And for the latest installment of the murder mystery series,
CSI: Miami, another song from Whos Next gets the cash-in treatment, this time
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one of Townshends best, Wont Get Fooled Again: Ill tip my hat to the
new constitution, take a bow for the new revolution, smile and grin at the
change all around.
Larry David Smith, in his excellent study of Townshends creative dynamic

and personal demons, isolated an impulse that is of great importance to our
understandingnot just of The Whos magic, or of Townshends own
brilliant rage, but of the creative nature of any singer-songwriter who needs
to share space with a partner in order to get his or her message across. That
impulse is the powerful desire to divest oneself of a partner and be a successful solo artist in ones own right.
Due to Townshends apparent ideal reflection of his audiences appetites,
he often appears to be more approachable, at least on the surface. In reality,
he is the same stature of rock god as Lennon or Dylan, but his immediacy
and ability to voice his audiences fears and feelings makes him open to being
accosted in surprising ways.
In the earliest days he was accosted by young kids in the streets of London
who thanked him for giving voice to their concerns in both I Cant Explain
and My Generation. As corny as it sounds, that was the moment when
he knew he had a sense of responsibility to tell the story, their story,
adequately.
In the later Who days, the late 80s, after the band had largely used up its
usefulness to Townshend as a rock-auteur, he was accosted by people his
own age who griped: Why dont you blokes do something fucking decent,
like in the old days? Weirdly, it could have been the same persona young
kid applauding his idol one minute, and an older peer the next, though separated by some 40 years or so.
Smith astutely points out:
This is the minstrels dilemma: a condition fostered by the complex relationships that exist between artist, his/her artistic aims, the commercial art
industry, and his/her audience. According to Townshend, the audience
gives you stardom and demands that you do what it wants. Therefore,
artists negotiate. If they are unwilling to enter into these negotiations, disappearing is a likely option.11
Townshend is the exemplar of the clever negotiator, but all great creative
stars, no matter how long they burned, were challenged by the same forces
in the marketplacethey needed to deliver what was on the menu designed
by the diners, or in this case, the listeners.
Tensions over audience expectations dogged Dylan, the dark mirror exemplar. His actions occasionally backfired on him, when he tried to introduce the
future too quickly. Brian Wilson faced a wave of resistance to his revised compositional style, which knocked him off his imaginary surfboard and confined
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him to bed. Audience expectations persistently pester Elvis Costello, as he continually changes his delivery system to match the design of his content.
Expectations typecast Marianne Faithfull, first as the ingenue muse deluxe,
and later as the whore junkie divine. They haunted Joni Mitchell until she
almost resigned as the torch bearer in protest about how the music business
had turned her into cookies. David Bowie was not as impacted by expectations, because the audience gave him permission to be different every time
he appeared on its fickle altar.
Self-expectations, amplified by the most intense public response in history,
started to erode The Beatles from the inside, until they really were a living
embodiment of the quadrophrenic personality.
But out of this whole motley crew of equally gifted and equally twisted geniuses, only The Stones and The Who, and later Pete Townshend as a successful
solo artist, managed to morph along with the audience as it aged, as it allowed
them to age with it and to continue reflecting their collective face and faces.
Now, it is only Townshend who continues to consistently give voice to a
troubled audience. He refuses to conceal his frailty, his vulnerability, his
compulsions, and his pathology. His surrogate self and voice, Roger Daltrey,
once commented that Pete would be a great songwriter only as long as he
had the proverbial blues hellhound on his trail.
Either Daltrey is buying into a popular myth about suffering producing
great poetry, or he is right on the bulls-eye in a disturbing way that cautions
us about projecting too much into these dark mirrors, or reading too much
into what they reflect back. Lets approach the subject, however, as if both
options were true, because, as usual, they are.
Townshend, like his polar star, Costello, crafts songs out of the thin
emotional air inside his rarefied personality, including all its roughhewn
edges.
I cant really explain what happens when I write songs. I think writing is a
mysterious process until you look back on it. And then like a criticlike a
clever criticyou can see clearly. Why Im attracted to the idea of storytelling, as a songwriter, is because it allows me to get closer to people with my
heart ideas. . .. I dont think that genius is a part of rock and roll, I think its
an instinctive process. A bit like sport. If you can do it, you can do it.12
The purpose of rock music, its function, is patently obvious to someone like
Townshend. And Smiths critical context sets the stage for it: Rock addresses
a specific moment in our individual lives and provides a means for our individual search for identity.13 He stopped just short of describing the dark mirror aspect of the singer-songwriters craft and cursethe hyper-personal
realm of the solipsist.
Then Townshend clarifies it so utterly: I think the function started to be about
the fact that we needed music which was about escape. I think rock and roll now
can be defined as this: its the dynamic between confrontation and escape.14
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This has to be one of the most perfectly awake and alert observations about
the energy source at the molten core of rock and roll music (when its created
by masters at the level of The Beatles, The Stones, The Who [and yes Pete, The
Kinks]) that Ive ever heard. This observation is equally true of those whose
own idiosyncratic musical styles took them far up the road from the raw
elements of original rock: David Bowie, Tom Waits, Elton John, and even
Fleetwood Mac eventually. They all used their personal lives as the raw
material for missives directed to a specific and unique audience, one that gets
cranky when it is no longer being reflected quite the way it feels it ought to
bethe way it imagined it was being celebrated in the first place.
In the case of Townshend and Daltrey, since one is the theatrical evocation,
manifestation, and even simulacrum of the other, we see the epitome of
the collaborative process so exemplified and raised to high art by Lennon
and McCartney, Richards and Jagger, Simon and Garfunkel, and Lindsey
Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. Perhaps the long lost sublimated romance of
Elton John and Bernie Taupin puts them in this same category of collaborators. These successful collaborations are marriages made in hell, where
ones intimate partner is someone with whom one creates great art, in this
case wonderful songs and music, but with whom one is at war on all other
levels.
Townshend faced this battle throughout his career with The Who and
beyond it, to this day tied to Daltrey in the public imagination in exactly the
morbid way that Paul Simon is tied to Art Garfunkel and Paul McCartney,
even sadder, is tied to John Lennon. These are the ties that bind, securing
the other half of their creative spirits, personifying a part of their own pathologies. Two brilliant half-components that together make something above
and beyond the considerable talents of either one separatelykind of like a
human personification of the dynamic between confrontation (Lennon) and
escape (McCartney).
Suddenly the creative personality phenomenon of the singer-songwriter
takes on a clarity usually associated with those eureka moments in science: we
can see clearly how distressing it must be to realize that when it came to the
secret of making some of the most unique and permanently fresh lyrical music
in our popular musical history, they were merely half a person. Creatively
speaking of course. Islands deliver their message alone and continents deliver
theirs in tandem with an alter ego so profoundly connected to their success that
they barely have a tangible existence apart from their sibling-like mirror image,
and through whom they look together in order to both write and sing the songs.
This is truly a remarkable case of one mirror facing another, surely the only
metaphor suitable for describing the results when Lennon and McCartney sat
down to write a song eye to eye, as they often liked to put it, or even more
staggering, when Bob Dylan sat down by himself to write his own. When it
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comes to doing what we need dark mirrors to do, thats the gold standard by
which everyone after needs to be judged.
Townshend spent himself through his successive phases: singles greatness

(almost as rapid and rare as The Beatles early proto-punk stage); the operatic phase, which he himself largely invented (apart from The Pretty Things
contribution of SF Sorrow in 1968); The Who phase; his rich mature solo stage;
and even his inevitable reprise of The Who brand with 2007s Endless Wire.
All are part of his original Holy Grailthat schizoid dynamic between leaping and fighting or running and hiding that is his own personal rosetta stone.
The energy he brought to each of his projects, Who or otherwise, remains
constant. The Who reinforced its violent image through the words of a songwriter who could instinctively articulate individual cries of frustration and
rebellion. Moreover, Towshend was quite willing to cultivate those instincts
to accommodate commercial objectives.15
Shockingly, after all hes been through, he still is just as ready as ever to
either capitulate or go kaput, since his role and function, like all the others
who would challenge the dangers of utterly solipsistic self-absorption in
order to reach an apparently selfless universal emotive message, is to entertain us while also delivering usually bad news about the state of human
affairs, especially his own. The Who are (like the Fleetwood Mac group was
in its own distinctive way) first and foremost a performing band.
I think that in a sense everything that I always hadif it was written for The
Whoit was obviously gonna be a stage piece, we were a performing band.
We werent a studio band like The Beatles had become and so that was the
distinction I would make to myself is that we cant do a Sgt. Pepper type
thing, we cant do a Pet Sounds kind of thing, we cant do a studio masterpiece, we have to do something that we can play.16
And play and play and play.

Townshend, like all continents who require the support of either partners or
bandmates, however loosely affiliated in order to proceed, passionately wanted
to be an island, one of those solo artists whose messages are transmitted via a
single persona, their own, regardless of who helped them with the delivery.
Im sure I invented punk, and yet its left me behind. If anything was ever a
refutation of time, my constant self-inflicted adolescence must be. Damage,
damage, damage. Its a great way to shake societys value system.17
As Smith pointed out so well in The Minstrels Dilemma, Townshends

pen merely evoked his state of mind. As we have seen, the artistic obligations
that surrounded The Who established a context for deteriorization. 18
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But Townshends solution, his resolution of the minstrels dilemma, was to

materialize in what Smith calls the impulses opportunity.
For Townshend, The Who had become an impediment to his own selfexpression, even though, on a grand scale seldom seen before or since, the
entire group was always precisely just such a vehicle mostly for his own
self-expression.
The Who, being famous for what they were famous for, dont turn out many
ballads. They also dont turn out much that isnt heavy in some way or
another. As a group we are self-consciously aware of our imagewe were
one of the English bands who grew up in that Beatle maniacal era when
image was almost as important as sound, probably more important. Weve
never lost that feeling, its somehow intrinsic to the band.19
Townshends solo career, longer than his band career, became the impulses
victory, and in a way that few other global superstars have ever been able to
pull off, a testament to his uniqueness even among fellow dark mirrors. The
evidence for this is plain to see and hear in his marvelous Scoop projects, vast
recordings of privately and personally made solo demos that clearly indicate
that he was The Who and the band itself was his instrument.
Ages ago, the great critic I.A. Richards stipulated the sense of a balancing
act between self-control and abandonment that all great artists share.
That the artist is not as a rule consciously concerned with communication,
but with getting the work, whatever it is, right, apparently regardless of its
communicative efficacy, is easily explained. He cannot stop to consider
how the public, or even how especially well qualified sections of the public,
may like it or respond to it. He is wise therefore, to keep all such considerations out of his mind altogether. Those artists and poets who can be
suspected of close separate attention to the communicative aspect, tend to
fall into a subordinate rank.20
So it is with the best of the bestthey change for personal reasons, they
change sometimes severely, like Dylan did and does, with the absolute and
incontrovertible belief, though not without occasionally shaky moments, that
if they fulfill their side of the bargain as dark mirrors, the public will fulfill
their own side, and follow the minstrel down whatever twisted and tortured
path he or she may choose to travel.
Townshends own surrogate voice in the band, Roger Daltrey, has perhaps
the most wistful assessment of his mates achievements:
He had an incredible perspective on what was happening around him.
He writes with incredible courage and incredible honesty and its not
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Dark Mirror
always easy to write like that, especially in those early years of your life
when youre all mixed up, not sure about this, not sure about that. And he
obviously had his finger on the pulse of what so many people were thinking, but maybe not saying, and he managed to say it for them in music.21
Accidentally, Daltrey also hit upon the reason why poetic and musical
mirrors of all sorts manage to articulate our core doubts: by having the bravery, or perhaps even recklessness, to express their own lack of certainty about
this or that, they express all of our own lack of sureness about anything and
everything. Which is exactly why we need them and, in some rare cases, we
revere them.
One thing we know for sure by now is that people who are sure about
something are also usually making a mistake. Except perhaps for someone
like T.S. Eliot, who observed that great art is often communicated before it is
fully understood. So it is with many dark mirrors, since they so often reflect
a future which has yet to occur, at least to anyone but them.
12
The Bridge Burners:
Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel
I Am an Island
Of course, its great when you have a hit and disappointing when you dont. But
I dont think wed get together if the potential for a joyous reunion wasnt there.
Wed never decide to grit our teeth just to make a couple of million dollars.1
Paul Simon
Paul Simons unique song stylings were for many years shared and interpreted by the angelic voice of his partner Art Garfunkel, with whom he has
been fighting and feuding since they were both 13 years old. They are
perhaps the most famous feuding performers in folk/pop music. The manner
in which Simon sublimates profound self-doubt and transforms it into a
brave forward motion through relationships is the key to his and their
success, even after all these years. With Simons new record, Surprise, the first
in eight years, he adds himself to the long list of performers who have sought
creative rejuvenation at the hands and in the ears of master producer
Brian Eno.
Yes, Simon could also be categorized as an island. No doubt.
Simon and Garfunkel? Werent they a phenomenon based in time and
history which was both finite and already finishing itself off even before the
decade endeda dream deferred? Yes, and that is precisely why its possible
to speak about, the continent of Simon and Garfunkel apart from the island of
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Paul Simon. They did indeed capture and become emblematic of the spirit of
the times, but they were also an example of an even more unique and special
variety of emblemthe emblematic empath.
By now it appears abundantly clear that all singer-songwriters, to varying
degrees, are empaths. Because of their personalities and their usually
uniquely tragic melancholies, they are in exile from the normal people they
succeed in reaching through their exotic communicationstheir songs.
As empathic exiles they voice the feeling of everyday people without ever
really hoping to experience what it means to be an everyday person. That
resulting schism is the vault where great songs are stored. The temperature
is low in there, and the air is thin. The songs occupy little shiny shelves
glistening in the darkness. Until we listen to and activate them.
An empath, by definition, feels what other people feel, and is able to
express it in a manner that lets people know that he feels it, without necessarily feeling that feeling originally himself. He is a screen, so to speak and
pun intended, on which feelings play out in public in a ritualized and stylized
form known as popular music.
One of our best singer-songwriters himself, James Taylor, captures the

essence of who and what Simon and Garfunkel are when he describes his
appreciation of them in Rolling Stone magazines Immortals issue.
The music stood by itself, quite apart from anything else around at the time.
Simon and Garfunkel brought something new to music: they brought themselves. Through it all, whether they were together or nottheyve remained
a force in American music and culture. Their impact has been huge.2
Like all the rest of us who encountered Simon and Garfunkels music when
it was new, when it first arose, Taylor agrees that they scored some of the
best years of our lives. But he is also cognizant, more so than even their
biggest fans might be, of the friction that sparks that particular creative plug.
That kind of partnership is like a marriage, only more difficult and more
public. You have two very strong willful individuals sharing this tight space.
You realize its not an uncommon pattern.3
Indeed, it was a marriage made in hell, like all the rest of the best symbiotic
collaborations weve been examining. Perhaps thats why the Olympian
Dylan stayed so far away from ever truly collaborating with a partner, save
for the remarkable Desire in 1975 with Jacques Levy. This body just aint big
enough for both of us.
There are two Simon and Garfunkels, one of which is timeless and lives in
the music, the other a tempestuous duo of arch rivals who occupy a joinedat-the-lip intimacy both together and in their own independent lives and
drastically different careers.
Taylor is effusive in his praise:
The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel
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Paul Simon has just always been one of our best songwriters. Pauls breakthrough came at a time when there was so much in the air, and many of
his songs were picked up as anthems. He creates an unusually rich and full
world, and he has such a broad palette, from basic and elemental folk music
to later songs with far greater sophistication and more worldly approaches
on solo work.4
With the Simon and Garfunkel brand, we are entering the quintessence of
what reflective and empathic songs are all about, especially when it comes
to transmuting turbulent competition into angelic harmony. Only Crosby,
Stills, Nash & Young managed to manufacture such heavenly harmonies
from the ego-soaked drug-addled rancor that made up the real people
involved. No one else has come close.
Paul Zollo put it quite admirably when he said, Regardless of genre or
generation, all songwriters are connected by this singular pursuit of merging
music and language to create songs.5
Referencing and agreeing with the Pete Seeger characterization that all
songwriters are links in a chain (but a pretty strange chain, one that includes
both Tom Waits and Joni Mitchell), Zollo concurs that, Songwriters are
forever united in this delicate balancing act of finding words that seamlessly
match the mandate of music, and music that enhances that lyric with a sense
of resonance and organic grace.6
In the case of the Simon and Garfunkel brand, the songs reveal a chemistry
between the two men which, as Stephen Holden pointed out during one of
their many reunions, echoes the message of The Boxerone of their greatest songs: After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same.
Garfunkels pristine, quivering folk-pop tenor filtered Simons wry, angstridden musings into a romantic soft focus, and the duos close harmonies
transformed dark compositions of doubt into warm exchanges of feeling.7
Like all the other highly successful practitioners of this ancient craft, this duo
encountered the huge challenge of trying to create something timeless out of
something mired in a specific time, and especially within a business environment that is ultimately concerned with fresh product lines using the same
ingredients once they have been proven popular. They dont call it popular
music for nothing. Zollo wrote,
For songwriting is much more than a mere craft. Its a conscious attempt to
connect with the unconscious; a reaching beyond ordinary perceptions to
grasp images that resonate like dreams, and melodies that haunt and spur
the heart. Even those who scoff at the suggestion of a spiritual source for
songs admit that the process is mysterious and cant be controlled. Paul
Simon said that mostly its a lot of waiting, waiting for the show to begin.8
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But by waiting for the show, Simon wasnt referring to the time when he
goes on stage, he was referring to the interior show that results from attending to and encouraging inspiration. Inspiration is the real show. The show
the rest of us see is only the result of the initial spark in a songwriters brain,
a transparent moment when he or she becomes capable of giving voice to
universal and invisible ideas and feelings.
These feelings, felt by the empathic exiles who become masterful singersongwriters, also invariably become as melancholy as Paul Simons lyrics
can become if they are given full reign. We can just as easily gauge the
emotional temperatures of the other selected singer-songwriters in this book
through the obvious similarities they all share personally and professionally,
as diverse as the Table of Discontents may be.
The salt in the wound for those dark mirrors who require the partnership of
a collaborator, whether to write or voice the words, is that their genius only
materializes fully half way. It, their genius, and them, its tool, need the salve
of the other half, their reciprocal doppelganger in order to appear at all.
Stephen Holden once expressed it very well:
In all their years as a singing team, these two boyhood buddies somehow
never learned how to talk to each other. Personal tics caused tension, and
quibbles accumulated into quarrels. Nothing major, but unpleasant memories
lingered.9
Even though they called it quits in 1970, every 10 years or so they rejoin and
rejoice, to both celebrate what they had together and to realize that it never
quite goes away. Central Parks 1981 reunion was a case in point, and then
again in 1993, and again in 2003.
Oliver Poole described his reaction to the latest of these forays into the
future past at the Staples Center in Los Angeles in 2003. (Even before the
lights went up to reveal the two figures on stage, a video montage of their
former selves was played on a giant screen suspended above them.)
Here were Simon and Garfunkel as the children who met aged 11, the crew-cut
teenagers in ties and jackets, the 60s folk singers traveling through New
Mexico, the early 70s incarnations walking separately down the same
road. This year is the 50th anniversary of when we first met, Art Garfunkel
told the audience. And the 47th of when we had our first argument, interrupted Paul Simon, before reaching out to touch the hand of his oldest musical
collaborator.10
In that LA concert, the 62-year-olds played the hits that marked the high
point of their shared careerit was like a set of sacred hymns to a more hopeful time. But the songs were a flow of hits that ended when their difficult
151
creative partnership did, 33 years before, half a lifetime away. Simon has since
shown himself to be worthy of consideration as a master American composer
of popular music, one at the melodic level of Brian Wilson but the lyrical level
of Randy Newman.
Simon and Garfunkels brand sustains itself solely because of the heat
generated by the hope they sang about, so deeply and personally in fact, that,
like The Beatles, their music still seems fresh and futuristic. This is mostly
because the music of that time period always was and always will be primarily
about the future, or even better, a future.
Their songs, created with Simons gifts for melody and mystery, do something different than did Lennons and McCartneys. They almost make us
nostalgic for the present. A wistful present moment wafts through all their
songs, and even or especially through the later mature works of the supremely
successful solo Simon.
Paul Zollo, himself a songwriter as well as literary writer who shares the
search for what makes a great song great, finds that magic quantum in:
lines that resonate deeply; you find your self thinking about them at
unexpected times. They are funny and serious, simple and complex, big and
small, clear and perplexing; they work on many levels at once, and speak to
the heart and mind at the same time.11
Like the music of most dark mirrors confined within the sort of partnerships
explored in this book, the music Simon made with Garfunkel remains indelibly etched into our collective memory, largely because it alone achieved an
iconic vibrational level of sorts. Only those artists who transform their
personalities into what Proust called a kind of mirror are the ones universally recognized as the kind of genius who becomes a brand name. Thats
the whole point.
As if destined to intertwine and entertain as one, they were raised literally a

block away from each other in the same neighborhood of Queens, New York.
They met backstage in a school production of a Lewis Carroll story and
started singing a capella together in 1954 when they were 13, learning music
by doing it rather than studying it.
They quickly formed the oddly named duo Tom and Jerry, emulating such
fine teams as The Everly Brothers, not only in their harmonies, but also in
their immediate sense of near sibling rivalry and creative competition and
in their clashes, conflicts, conflagrations, and collaborations.
While still in high school they performed on American Bandstand, the great
showcase of the day, and after releasing an original song called Hey Schoolgirl, attempted to emulate their heroes with teenaged enthusiasm. But their
next three records were not as well received as their first lucky strike, and
incredibly enough, they broke up for the first of many, many times.
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In 1964, they rejoined and used their own names for the first time, recording
the classic folk album Wednesday Morning, 3 AM for Columbia, an album that
was not especially popular and caused them to break up again. While Simon
was away in England writing some of his greatest future songs on his own, a
producer added some instrumental fire to one of his earliest efforts,
The Sounds of Silence, and it became a hit, much to Simons consternation.
He believed its pop-rock feeling had compromised its folkish roots.
Simon returned from England and reunited with Garfunkel again. They
managed to remain a team for the next decade, creating many contemporary
classics whose tenderness, hurt, and harmonies have yet to be equaled.
The albums Sounds of Silence, Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends, and
Bridge Over Troubled Water (perhaps their masterpiece) secured them a permanent place in the folk-rock pantheon.
Early on, however, they both realized two things: they didnt like working
together, and the world wanted them to work together. It wasnt the waters
that were troubled, it was the bridge itself that was the problem, and no
amount of architectural restoration could repair it, or so they thought. They
were two best friends who didnt need to look far for an enemy to fight.
In 1970, after Bridge Over Troubled Water became a massive hit, they broke
up once again, with Simon attempting again, and quite successfully this time,
to launch a solo career on his own terms. His terms clicked almost at once:
Paul Simon, There Goes Rhymin Simon, Still Crazy After All These Years,
One-Trick Pony, Hearts and Bones, and of course, Graceland and The Rhythm of
The Saints.
He had the magic touch, one we have often wondered about the origins of,
considering at first he was writing pop ditties of little consequence. Suddenly
he came into his own voice and never lost it for four decades, maturing into a
serious poet of pain along the way.
Im trying to find out if theres anyone besides Bob Dylan who influenced
me. . .but I cant really imagine that there was. It might not have been Dylan
directly but it was the folk scene in Greenwich Village. Dylan was so dominant a force that in a way you can attribute it to him. Although Im sure he
was influenced by the street too. That scene probably influenced that kind
of writing.12
Never have truer words been spoken, because in a way, a very real way,
absolutely everything in this book can be attributed to Dylan. He is the mayor
of the town that all the rest of the singer-songwriters of our age now live in.
There was simply nothing that emerged from turmoil quite so effortlessly as
the unique balancing act between Simon and Garfunkel at their best, regardless of the fact that Simon has so obviously established himself as a solo
American song master ever since. Sometimes a good journalistic question elicits more than the anticipated response, as when Paul Zollo asked Simon what
amounted to a question about the role of suffering in the creation of beauty.
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He commented, Gerry Goffin (Carole Kings partner) said that since his life
has become so comfortable, its not as easy for him to write. He felt he needed
some turmoil in his life to stimulate him. Simon responded, Im not really
sure. Turmoil does provoke or elicit emotions more. But I wouldnt put my life
into turmoil in order to write. Theres plenty of turmoil that you contain with
you for years and years and years that you can tap into.13
The strange thing about listening to the music made by the entity known as
Simon and Garfunkelthe songs that Simon wrote for that echo voice of his
is that, whenever you hear one, you think the song is about you, or your
best friend.
We know that The Boxer is supposed to be about Dylan, though Simon says
he doesnt know what its really about. Ever notice how all the best songs are
utter blanks to their composers? Thats because they werent really there when
the pieces were written, not really. They were in that special empathic trance
that allows us to be there. When we listen to The Boxer, it is us in the clearing.
How is it that this song, or some of his other greatest songsThe Only
Living Boy In New York or America for instanceallow us to experience
what we are already experiencing but through the lens of someone at a
distance who is reflecting the experience back to us?
Simon explains,
The subject of popular song has been the same forever. And if you put it in the
right setting, that is the subject matter for popular songs. People need it. They
never get tired of hearing. . .songs about love. Its one of the big things that we
think about, and this is one of the areas where we can express it. Youve only
got words and rhythm. So youve got to make those words say something.
Writing songs is what I do. Im grateful that people are still interested after
all this time. Ive been interested in writing songs and making records since
I was thirteen years old. And Im still absolutely enthralled by it.14
Simon and Garfunkels two masterpieces remain Bookends (1968) and Bridge
(1970), both made when they were falling apart but at the same time ascending
the ranks of superstardom, a common happening for dark mirror partnerships.
Bookends was well characterized in The Mojo Collection as their massively
successful breakthrough album as former folkies who, by that point, had
shifted from their roots significantly enough to be considered pop stars. Their
fourth album, it was the first to actually reach a mass audience. With side ones
song suite outlining a journey from life to death, Simon had emerged as one of
the great voices of the age, both literary and vocal, though, at the time, he still
needed the soaring angel voice of his echo-brother to soothe his rough edges.
Simon and Garfunkel only had complete control of three of the five albums
they recorded together, and in many ways Bookends stands as their finest
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moment. The duo stood in charge of the production and overall sound, and
were eager to leave the formulas of pop-production and experiment, which
may help to explain the albums timeless quality.15
It took two years of wrangling before the all-conquering but by comparison to Bookends, a little sterile16 Bridge appeared, which Mojo correctly called
a generation-defining, multi-platinum farewell to the 60s.17
By the time S and G came to make Bridge Over Troubled Water, they were drifting apart. Art was preoccupied with his acting career and consequently Paul
felt he was no longer pulling his weight. It was a tough album to make,
Garfunkel has admitted, but tough is one of the words that leads to great
results. That it still stands as their definitive statement is a measure of Simons
tendency to shine brightest in adversity. Ironically, just as the duo had split up
just before their first hit, Sounds of Silence in 1965, by the time Bridge
scooped six Grammys on March 16, 1971, Paul Simon was a solo artist.18
Just what he had always wantedto be alone. To be free of his echofree

of his shadow.
13
The Love Addicts:
Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks
Storm Songs
Conicts between collaborators are not always resolved. In some intense personal
partnerships, they failed to resolve the tension between their cooperative and
competitive drives. The sustainability of a collaboration depends on the supporting
structures in which it is embedded.1
Vera John-Steiner
There are many examples of personally intimate partners engaging in a

professional creative collaboration in music, and indeed in several other
spheres of endeavor, but not many as famous and infamous as Lindsey
Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. They became a kind of iconic brand for the
age-old artistic curse of only being truly creative with someone you dont even
like anymore, and the curse of having to do it for the sake of this amazing
music, and of course, the lifestyle consequences of that lofty level of success.
They are the guitarist/producer and the writer/vocalist of Fleetwood Mac,
in their third and most successful incarnation, with their most notable contributions to that bands astronomical commercial success being Fleetwood Mac
(1975) and, Rumours (1977). Very few people of a certain age will fail to know
those records well. They know them too well perhaps.
Lovers who try to be artistic partners are legion in the annals of sheer
emotional hell and its redemption through the aesthetics of reciprocal
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maintenance: Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, Frida Kahlo and Diego
Rivera, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Henry Miller and Anais Nin,
Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. And even Lucy and Desi. The list
appears to be endless. But each member of these artist couples still made
separate works, albeit works that were drastically influenced by their partners.
Songwriting and musical performance is all about the challenge of merging
five or so separate and volatile personalities into one balanced musical
machine. A rare feat on a good dayan absolute miracle to repeat it over and
over. Imagine trying to write a song together, or trying to compose one for the
voice of your significant other, then having to perform it live in concert after
recording it for months, if not years, during which time you and your lover
have mutually experienced firsthand the living out of the songs not too subtle
subtexts of jealous rage and competitive loathing. Imagine doing it in front of
everybody on a big global tour again and again because your harrowing tale
of romantic woe has become a hit listened to by every couple on the planet
having an argument in their car. Suddenly, the radio crackles and on comes
Go Your Own Way by Lindsey Buckingham and Fleetwood Mac. Or it could
be The Ballad of John and Yoko, or even Jet by Paul and Linda McCartney,
or anything at all by the great Carole King and Gerry Goffin.
A wonderful book by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron called
Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership takes great strides
towards understanding the dynamics of this contest between claustrophobia
and creativity. The authors addressed the alluring topic of the challenge to
creative freedoms that is inherent within an intimate relationship structure
that is unbalanced by nature and amplified by art.
In their book they delved into the complexities of partnerships and collaborations, the painful as well as the rewarding. They explored the negotiation
of new relationships with stereotypes associated with solitary creative
struggle.
In general, their work indicated that artistic relationships are less fixed, more
open to both conscious and unconscious negotiation than history leads us to
believe. They describe dynamics across the board which reveal the complexities of a union between two artists, especially when one has an antipathy to
competition and the other is either extremely sure (or unsure) of himor herself.
Added to which, in the cases of the couples who interest me here, there are
the additional unbalances commonly associated with highly strung
emotional songwriters (empaths). All of this collides in a testy cocktail of
codependency and bottomless sorrow. Performing artists, who are after all
mediums in a manner of speaking, are often the most prone to the pitfalls of
varied pathologies being allowed to play out in and through the creative act.
In Vera John-Steiners book, Creative Collaboration, she captures some of the
reliance on sparks that becomes so prevalent in pop music partnerships.
She says, There are many examples of close collaboration among intimates
The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks
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where mutual support and criticism contribute greatly to each partner s

success, or to the success of a single endeavor valued by both partners.2
So it is with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, perhaps the most famous
feuding spouses in musical history. Their single endeavor, valued by both, was
the astronomical blockbuster success of Fleetwood Mac. So it is also with their
substantially less famous British counterpartsRichard and Linda Thompson.
It was very instructive for me to realize that this creative dynamic operates
in multiple cultures, in different styles and for different reasons, all the while
remaining identical with regard to the core components of the collaborative
nightmare: Must I work with this person alone to achieve anything like this
magical success? The answer is, yes.
John-Steiner wrote, A fierce belief in the work of ones significant other as
well as a willingness to criticize it characterizes most accounts of artistic and
intellectual partnership.3 Such was certainly the case in the songwriting teams
of Buckingham/Nicks and the Thompsons. Though Im sure that both couples
would be surprised to hear themselves spoken of in the same context as Jean
Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, or Will and Ariel Durant, nonetheless they
do belong amazingly close together.
Having written extensively about the Buckingham/Nicks contribution to

late Fleetwood Mac (19752003) in my previous book, Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years
of Creative Chaos, I am very pleased to have the opportunity to focus more
attention on the grueling creative marriage of this team and its totem, the
addiction to love.
Whether or not I subscribe to the idea that their mature pop phase was
Fleetwood Macs finest, the addition of this divorce-doomed couple to comingle with the also divorcing leaders of the group was certainly a case of destiny
speaking loudlyespecially since all the ingredients of Fleetwood Mac, apart
from a rhythm section of genius, of course, already existed in the Buckingham
Nicks album. The session playing drummer and the bassist even sounded as if
they unconsciously wanted to sound like Fleetwood and McVie but didnt
know how, not surprisingly. With the albums sexually suggestive cover, a
nude from the chest up portrait of Nicks as a classic hippie girl with her
Svengali-like partner Lindsey, it introduced us to a new kind of candor when
it comes to emotional confessions of the hearts fresh damages.
Lindsey Buckingham and Stephanie Nicks first performed professionally
in 1968 in a San Francisco band called Fritz, opening on the same bills as big
names such as Santana, Chicago, and Hendrix. Following the bands demise
in 1971, the two remained together and released the Buckingham Nicks album
in 1973.
Even though he had heard the tape of this record only once, it was Mick
Fleetwood who requested, early in 1975, that Buckingham and Nicks become
part of Fleetwood Mac. But they were not just part of, they actually became
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Fleetwood Mac. Once you hear this album, the liner notes declare, youll
know why.
From the very beginning, and as he would throughout his Fleetwood Mac
career (right up to their latest recording in 2003), Buckingham is bemoaning
what appears to be his disintegrating relationship with Nicks. This ironic
self-analysis would serve as the raw material for practically every song the
duo ever wrote, whether together or apart.
From the public perspective, they are the key elements and the brand name
behind the hugely popular band Fleetwood Mac. Their personal relationship
and their songwriting relationship are equally complex and are fraught with
the cunning and curious replaying, again and again, of similar domestic,
marital, and romantic themes. Theirs is the veritable template for romantic
myth and emotional alienation which can be expertly disguised as danceable,
feel-good pop music.
This sensational love-hate dialogue is something like what Robert and
Elizabeth Barrett Browning may have penned back and forth if they had been
rock stars, if they had been even more dysfunctional than they were, and if
their lives had been consumed by celebrity and numbed by cocaine.
Suddenly, overnight they were surfing on the crest of a breaking wave known
as Fleetwood Mac, which by now had taken on a life of its own and only had to
be prodded with a stick a little to the left or right in order to reach the big time
that always seemed just around the corner. But this time, the big time
really was just around the corner, and the big stick they were given, like a gift
of manna from heaven (or hell, in the case of all the suffering involved with their
newest partners) came to them in the form of two more Californian dreamers.
Someone once said that the whole is less the sum of its parts than the movement between each of them. The emotional movement between Buckingham
and Nicks, charged with dark hubris at the best of times, would soon be
perilously but creatively merged with the intense and abstract emotional
movement between the historical and hysterical parts of Mac, charged with
a mania for making music even in the worst of times.
The result would be spontaneous combustion indeed, even though it took a
full 10 years for it to spontaneously explode on an unsuspecting musical
world. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks are so intertwined, personally,
professionally, and creatively, that their lives can be viewed in tandem, since
that indeed is the way the art of their songs is crafted and delivered.
They met each other at a party where a casual sing-along was in progress,
apparently a Beach Boys song according to accounts, and from the moment
they began to harmonize together, they instantly realized the creative charge
that existed between them. They later explored this charge, or tried as best
they could, in their youthful band called Fritz, which played locally and even
performed at their own 1967 graduation party.
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Ironically, in that years summer of hope, as Peter Green was forming Fleetwood Mac in London, Buckingham and Nicks were forming a romantic and
musical bond of their own that would only come into full fruition some seven
years later when they would be utterly stunned to be invited to join the
revolving-door band on the strength of their first and last solo record
together.
Their peculiar love affair, so fraught with the ups and downs of highly
emotional and self-centered artists and their egos, would form the crux and
crucible of the dynamic energy that came to be synonymous with the soon
to be globally famous pop group, Fleetwood Mac. Their quite beautiful
harmonies, when merged with the deep voice and deeper feeling of Christine
McVie, would create that unique and signature melodic style that would soon
make Mac into a corporate brand of astonishing scale, scope, and influence.
If anyone had listened carefully to the self-titled Buckingham Nicks album
of 1973, their only recording under that name, they would have clearly
heard the future of Fleetwood Mac. That record, especially the track
Frozen Love, not only told the whole story, it also seemed to be a prophecy of the whole whirlwind ride that was awaiting them. Unfortunately,
few people bought or listened to the record. It would be rereleased to much
acclaim in 1977, after the chemical and emotional magic of the newest
combination of sounds and souls was blissfully obvious to everyone. After
Rumours made it obvious.
But Mick Fleetwood listened, and he listened hard. He admits to being
floored by the technical prowess of the guitar style of Buckingham and the
gorgeous harmonies he produced with his young girlfriend, Stevie Nicks.
Fleetwood at that moment in 1974 heard the future of Fleetwood Mac as
clearly as if a time machine had opened its jaws and spit the sultry couple
out onto his lap.
The 70s, the decade of a dream deferred, and the 80s, the decade of a dream
cashed in, would be the perfect social and political fodder for the new Macs
strategy for world domination: turn the basic blues into a slickly produced
pop package that celebrates the transcendence of suffering through a compulsive immersion into its very core. It would become the soundtrack for a society
intent on living as if there was no tomorrow.
By diving so deeply into their own personal lives, sustaining their professional relationship for the sake of the music, while their emotions and
psyches melted down in public, Buckingham and Nicks in particular and the
Fleetwood Mac brand in general succeeded in capturing the tenor of the times
as few before them had done.
Long Distance Winner contains many prescient moments that appear to
encapsulate the dynamics of both their relationship and their future fame.
This time its Nicks, making a statement to her lover with a song that also
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serves as a cautionary tale for a band she didnt even belong to yet. But not
unlike the blue white fire, you burn brightly in spite of yourself, I bring the
water down to you, but youre too hot, too hot to touch.
The two most important songs on their solo record are Crystal, reproduced to great effect by Macs eponymous white album in 1975, and Frozen
Love, the classic from the record that made Mick Fleetwood stand up and
take notice. As mentioned, what he noticed was his own future.
When Nicks intones the mournful celebration of her lover in Crystal, she
creates a magical kind of adulation. Amazingly, the Mac version of this song
increased its weirdly worshipful tone, while at the same time injecting it with
the necessary punch and unique harmonies to make it one of the bands first
big hits together.
Few songs capture the essence of a love affair run aground like the
harrowing Frozen Love, the song that rewarded Fleetwood for always
trusting his first initial feeling. Comparisons of this quite beautiful but
disturbing love song with either the title song of the latest Mac album, Say
You Will (2003), or with their shared closing epistles on the same record,
Say Goodbye and Goodbye Baby, will send chills up and down your
spine.
This Fleetwood Mac swan song record (unless they surprise us all again)
debuted at #3 on the billboard charts and was supported by a successful, if
largely nostalgic, world arena tour through 2004. Say You Will harkens back
to the debut Buckingham Nicks album and appears to retread some of those
intense stories from a retrospective point of view. Where the first record
looked forward to a dream, the last record looks backward at a dream, with
predictable results.
In some ways, it is the best real Fleetwood Mac record in years, even with
Nickss shattered voice and monotone nasal renderings. It captures what the
fuss was all about in the first place.
Yet another solo Buckingham record that got away from him, Say You Will
is a perfect climax to a perfect career path, unless there is yet another swift
kick left in the old brood yet. Unfortunately, Christine McVie was missing
from this last album, peacefully retired from the fray.
Whats The World Coming To? starts the coaster rolling in fine style;
Buckingham laments in fine fierce form. Nicks does her usual diva turn with
Illume and Thrown Down but manages to reach a true emotional clarity
with the title track, Say You Will. And her Silver Girl, directed towards
some of her songstress offspring such as Sheryl Crow, offers cautionary tales
to any young girl who thinks rock and roll might be a suitable lifestyle.
Her grand Destiny Rules serves as a synopsis of why the group has been
through so much together and what the glue might be that links the chains
that bind them.
As if saving the best for last, and also choosing to summarize their own
frayed bond together as both lovers and collaborating artists, the artists close
the album with Buckinghams Say Goodbye and Nickss Goodbye Baby.
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Buckingham: Once you said goodbye to me, now I say goodbye to you.
Nicks: Goodbye baby, I hope your hearts not broken, dont forget me, yes
I was outspoken.
But some goodbyes are not just long goodbyes, some goodbyes go on forever.
For Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, a tortured duo of undeniable

talents guided by a technical production wizard of prodigious gifts, there is
obviously more blood left in this so very, very smooth stone, polished from
years of mutual creative caressing. Even if sometimes with a clenched fist,
caressed smooth nonetheless.
When Stevie and Lindsey proceeded to fall apart at the seams as a couple,
they remained creatively committed. Just as when Mick split from his wife,
and when the McVies, after years of troubled togetherness aggravated by
John McVies alcoholism, finally divorced each other, they too remained
wedded to the musical group.
It was a harmonic collision all right. The breakup of Lindsey and Stevie was
very public. Then, after Micks long-strained marriage finally fell apart, and
he himself, ever addicted to fresh chaos, eventually embarked on a two-year
affair with Nicks, Christine sought solace in the arms of a man who fixed
her spotlight.
All the while, the personal entries and letters they each penned in their
diaries, containing everything from confessions to declarations, slowly
surfaced like ripples on the pop culture pond. And they were all true. Their
love-hate letters to each other, and their diary entries to themselves, were transformed into strangely haunting and universal anthems of a special sort of
shared angst every one of us could get into with gusto.
It was the kind of dangerous and obsessive musical ride that would only be
possible if shared between intimate partners who also worked together
professionally, and whose shared intimacy became the very core of their work
as singer-songwriters. Such a ride has the kind of venom that is often only
possible between either siblings or ex-lovers.
It was this deep tenacity and hunger for ultimate success that would hold
them all in good stead during the making of their blockbuster, and even
beyond, keeping them as together as a scarily dysfunctional family.
The link of the shared desire of this group as a whole, bonding them all
through a force hard to define for mere mortals like the listening audience,
would form the emotional glue that no amount of excess, drug addiction, or
interpersonal mayhem could unstick. Fleetwood Mac would eventually
evolve into something like a cult in its own right. There was just no leaving,
and the only reason for staying was to provide music for the audiencethey
would never break the chain.
Now, why couldnt The Beatles figure that out?
14
The Emblem Benders:
Elton John/Bernie Taupin
Madmen across the Water
People like to label you. Ive never liked being labeled. I cant take it because Im never
going to do the same thing over and over and over. I hate being limited. I hate being
put in a box. The music that Ive made, the way that Ive carried myself, Ive always
had this weird broad audience.1
Elton John
Elton John (aka Reginald Dwight) is an artist who utterly reinvented himself,
creating his own new and exotic persona. Considering how fateful and laden
with synchronicity their career together has been, it is ironic that Elton John
first met Bernie Taupin under circumstances so chancey they were almost
incredible.
According to Bernie Taupins own hilariously self-serving book of lyrics,
The One Who Writes The Words for Elton John, their partnership could easily
never have happened at all.
In 1967, Bernie Taupin answered an advertisement in New Musical Express
for songwriters. His interest, he says, was pure curiosity, though still being a
teenager his mother heavily encouraged him to enter the contest, even going
so far as to take the crumpled coupon out of the waste basket and handing
it to him again to reconsider. The result of this fluke was one of the most
famous and effective songwriting teams of the last century.
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Reginald Dwight had also sent in his submission, that of an equally

young and starry-eyed kid with delusions of grandeur. He could write
music but not words, whereas Taupin could write words but not music,
so the executives in charge showed each of them the other s work and
introduced them.
Nine years later they were on top of the world, and Taupins book of lyrics
was being published. And Elton, who by then had clearly found himself a
new and ultra-mutable identity, wrote the following tongue-in-cheek foreword to the book:
I always managed to keep him under wraps, well out of the way, but now the
little twerp wants fame, fortune, recognition of his own. During the last part
of his tribute, John is seen tearing his hair transplant out and gradually frothing at the mouth. The audience starts to rush the exits. Sobbing frantically
now, John screams at them, and as the last remaining chords of Your Song
echo around the now virtually empty room, the last words trickle from this
pasty little troll of a man.2
Well, one can clearly see why Elton never wrote his own lyrics, or at least
not in the beginning. His partner in crime in making gold records, Taupin,
got his suitable sarcastic revenge on the little troll who became larger than
life; he wrote in his preface that followed his boyhood friends jibes:
Hey you, you sad-eyed old friend of mine, theres a song that Ive heard but
its drifting away on a wavelength that crackled and died. And I remember
the singer, in fact he was a legend. Ive a book full of interesting names, a
scratched forty-five and so many memories. Somehow without music its just
not the same. It was simple to us, we were born children of fate sold to the
world in twelve inch frames, given our tickets, herded to heaven in a private
plane. But unmistaken, the music sailed above us. Its power on the masses
never died. But when our systems fed the voice, it was the words upon his
lips that made the crowd that watched him cry.3
Now that has to be one of the most incisive indictments against mistaking
the message of a song for the sounds that convey it that Ive ever heard. It is
also spookily prescient. Even in their early- to mid-career phase, it was clear
that the power of their music on the masses would not die anytime soon,
and its still clear that it was Taupins words over which the audiences wept
wicked tears. But then again, here was a situation not unlike that of Lennon
and McCartney, or that of any other superlative creative team. You just could
not separate them, or even tell one from the otherat least when the magic
was working really well.
Yet it was also true that eventually, very quickly in fact, these two young
sojourners on the yellow brick road did not exactly like each other very much.
They needed each other too much. And like almost every other remarkably
successful singer-songwriter team in this book that became a lasting brand,
The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin
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they first knew each other when they were still basically childrenlong
before their individual personalities had really developed.
Then, when their personalities did develop, each one, like always happens,
chafed against the confines of the otherthat other person who had formerly
served as the other half of his own unformed future self. Their first big hit,
Your Song now seems like a personal letter or an entry in a diary, and one
can easily imagine it cast as an epistle, an epistle to Elton:
Dear Elton,
If I were a sculptor, but then again, no, or a man who makes potions in a
traveling show, I know its not much, but its the best I can do, my gift is my
song, and this ones for you.
Yours bluely, Bernie
But, of course, it is one of the powerful and strange qualities of being a dark
mirror that made us all imagine, when he crooned, this is your song, that he
meant this was our song. Still, whoever it was written for, it has become ours,
permanently. Such is the alchemy of the mirror. We own its fantasies.
The three masterpieces John and Taupin created together were Tumbleweed
Connection (1970), Madman across the Water (1971), and Honky Chateau (1972),
with Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (1973) thrown in as a fine chaser. As they
matured, and as their connection began to fade, they were still able to access
the high wire and work without a net in order to produce Captain Fantastic
and the Brown Dirt Cowboy (1975), perhaps their most personal and autobiographical offering.
Mojo Magazines Tom Doyle had the perfect take on Johns longevity and his
ability, like a great painter, to return to form regardless of how many bad
paintings he might turn out. There is always another great one waiting in
the wings for his voice to animate its words. But Doyle was equally accurate
in his reference to Johns well-known volatility (and volatility is the polite
word to use here).
He trampled America, hung with his idols and took every drug in the tin.
Elton John defined 70s rock superstardom from the heights of his stack heels
to the depths of his depressions. Yet behind the goofy glasses seethed a
complex relationship with his success, his sexuality and his songwriting
partner.4
As Tom Doyle revealed in his 2006 profile piece for Mojo, Elton Johns latest
album revisits his golden age in more ways than one. The early 70s saw him
achieve vertical take off, but he also engaged in a horizontal slide psychologically from which he is in permanent recovery. And part of that recovery
includes the release of his 44th album, The Captain and The Kid, the 2006 autobiographical sequel to 1975s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, a
return to format at least, if not fully to form.
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This whole question of cowboys and the Americana of the frontier is a

compelling and strange quality in the hands of two young kids floating
around London during the long ago summer of hope. When John (then still
Dwight) and Taupin met in the summer of 1967 after that fateful magazine
advertisement brought them together, they too could see that Chance is the
fools name for Fate.
I was expecting someone very hip, Taupin commented. He was incredibly young, I was very nervous, observed Elton. But we hit it off straightaway. It was a kismet thing. He became the brother I always wanted. It was
one of the happiest times in my life because we were inseparable.5
They were about to embark on a profoundly puzzling partnership and
musical journey that continues, albeit somewhat limping, to this day, a journey that somehow allowed two young Brits to spookily channel some of the
rootsy spirit of American consciousnessthe spirit that was also perfectly
embodied back then by The Band. The Bands 1968 Music From Big Pink
changed the musical horizon of the time; we knew that, but few expected
their spirit to inspire these English lads to create the frontier experiments of
Tumbleweed, Madman, and Honky.
When the core message of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is examined, it
becomes clear that Taupin in particular really was that kind of frontiersman,
that it wasnt an affectation by any means. He actually did disdain the sparkling world of Johns persona and really did want to go back to his plough.
Their intense and intimate relationship, possibly laden with delirious
sublimation, and forged through the nearly perfect and seemingly fully developed sound of their debut album Empty Sky, became even more cemented
when Taupin began to encounter the darker and more conflicted side of John,
almost immediately. The bond, though bad, was also brilliant. Almost bright
enough to light up their shared darkness, but not quite.
The pair shared a flat in Islington with Eltons fiancee (thats right, his fiancee),
Linda Woodrow, until his confusion and desperation over his sexuality
became apparent when he tried to gas himself, only to be discovered by Bernie.6
John now declares that he had backed himself into a wall, he didnt really
want to get married and one night when he went out drinking with Long John
Baldry, his friend and mentor, Baldry told him, For fucks sake, youre more
in love with Bernie than you are with this woman. . .come to your senses.7
He came to his senses in a big way, devoted himself to being who he really
was and is, and never looked back, though his love-hate relationship with his
creative partner became ever more fractious as time went on. Doyle encapsulated their personal and professional dynamic quite succinctly:
Reg Dwights transformation into Elton John was well underway. But if he
was Elton on the exterior, inside he felt still very much like Reg. I was very
comfortable on the stage but not very comfortable off of it. Although I was
having a ball, youre still stuck with the insecure nervous person inside.
And just being successful doesnt cure it. No way. In fact, it makes things
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worse because then the difference between your stage persona and your
normal self is so far removed.8
Shades of the infamous Lennon syndrome, mixed of course with the prerequisite fulfilled-dream syndrome favored by rockers.
Bernie Taupin was the gritty backwoods recluse who put those distressing
words under the shiny coating of Eltons magisterial pop bombast. Thats
why it is such a treat to read the words to certain lesser known or unknown
(or unreleased) songs and then come upon the mental symphonies that ensue
when you read the words to a huge hit. As words.
The music and the words are inseparable, the words could never have come
into the air except through that particular melodic vehicle. But when you look
at the actual words, they are rather dark indeed, especially once their partnership was paralyzing and Taupin began writing songs about Elton himself,
which he had to belt out under the blazing lights of his own lunacy.
Even the apparently most benign Taupin song has hidden recesses that
only seem to emerge fully inside the voice of Johns idiosyncratic sense of
rhythm and melody. Its spooky. Always will be.
Friends (1971) was a soundtrack album for a medium scale film the two
worked ona film with a synchronistic scenario that mirrored their own.
In it Bernie has Elton sing: It seems to me a crime that we should age,
these fragile times should never slip us by; a time you never can or shall
erase, as friends together watch their childhood fly.
But in was on Madman across the Water that I believe a lyrically maturing
Taupin made an effortlessly brilliant Elton say the most incredible things.
Breathtaking and beautiful.
Goodbye: For I am a mirror, I can reflect the moon, I can write songs for
you, Ill be your silver spoon.
This same album reveals the beginnings of incipient solipsistic rage when
Taupin has John say, Well come again next Thursday afternoon, the
in-laws hope theyll see you very soon; but is it in your conscience that youre
after, another glimpse of the madman across the water?
And then, as if to demonstrate for all to see just how much like ventriloquism
songwriting really is, on the same record Taupin has Elton say: If I were an
artist who paints with his eyes, Id study my subject and silently cry, cry
for the darkness to come down on me, for confusion to carry on turning the
wheel.
Meanwhile, in their real personal lives, confusion really was turning the
wheel. Through the mid-70s, just as it did for the third incarnation of Fleetwood Mac, cocaine reared its tantalizing head before the boys in the band.
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By 1975, the moment of one of their finest efforts, Captain Fantastic, the lads
had developed gargantuan habits. Their party place was Caribou Ranch,
among suitably snow-capped mountains, where all roads led to the palace
of excess but none of them came back with any wisdom.
Elton remembers that, We always used to say there was more snow inside
than outside. That period was pretty much the apex of our abuse.9 According
to Tom Doyle,
In spite of this, the first half of the year saw them turn in Captain Fantastic,
arguably the duos finest album and their first to debut at number one in the
US (Rock of the Westies followed). Nostalgic for their earlier struggles
notably less than a decade earlier, though Elton says it felt much further
awayand self-mythologizing, it painted Elton as Superstar and Bernie,
through his passion for horse-rearing, as the Western fan now in the saddle.
Lyrically, Taupin had always written as half-Bernie, half-Elton, but Captain
Fantastic seemed more vividly autobiographical than usual.10
Elton suddenly understood the meanings of the songs, since, as he has

admitted, it was about us. To be able to write about yourself at your creative
peak is a rare treat. Few artists, save for those at the lofty level of John Lennon,
Keith Richards, or Pete Townshend, have been able to accomplish that feat,
though, naturally to some extent, that is the very crux of what makes the best
singer-songwriters in the first place. The best have the obscure ability to write
about themselves and project empathy for others feelings at the same time
in short, they act as a medium.
It just flowed out of me, Elton has said of the process of peak performance (what I have earlier referred to as the flow state). It is uniquely true that
he has maintained this flow state for as long or longer than many of his peers,
usually when he works with Taupin at his sidemostly when he does, in fact.
This makes the comparison between their 1975 masterpiece and their 2006
update of the myth, The Captain and the Kid, all the more poignant. As John
himself put it, We were dealing with failure on the first one. The new
albums all about dealing with the fucking success.11
Doyle has a good take on the inherent irony of revisiting the present:
One key track on the new record, Tinderbox, deals with the combustible
relationship between Elton and Bernie come 1975: Two sparks could set
the whole thing off, rubbing up together around the clock. In the aftermath
of the jacked-up Rock of the Westies, and the jazz and folk-flecked Blue Moves,
1976, there was little left of their relationship but ashes. Both were in a bad
way, and for the first time Elton turned down some of Bernies lyrics as
too depressing.12
One can only imagine just how depressing something would have to be for
Elton, the emperor of angst, to find it depressing. And yet, 32 years later, on
The Captain and the Kid, up pops yet another little ditty about cocaine
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psychosis. The Doyle interview also revealed a long-standing glue that holds
their relationship rogether. Blue Moves was our Mount Everest, the lyricist
said. Wed gone to the top. Im sure drugs, alcohol, the geographical thing,
it all contributed. But the base core of it was I dont know if we knew what
we were going to do next. Or if we could do it. But we never argued about
it.13 Sounds too good to be true.
Elton says that he never had an argument with his partner, at least not the
kind one would expect from a pair of dark mirrors trapped in a windowless
room with a band, drugs, and nothing but ones own imagination to work
with. Which is extraordinary when you think of some of the great partnerships that have fallen foul of each other because of jealousies and egos, states
Elton.14
We can think of 20 or so right off the top just by glancing at the Table of
Discontents in this book. But if there is a renaissance of sorts between these
long-time collaborators and their remarkable shared musical vibe, it certainly
shines through in the dark lyrics from Taupin that have punctuated their
return to sharing it.
While listening to these rousing mature rockers, loud with emotion but not
volume, I was reminded of one of my favorite things about that old copy of
Bernie Taupins lyrics book that I savedthe one with the modestly declarative title, The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John. Towards the last page
there is a section called Credits. Within that section is a full-page spread
of Taupin, photographed from the rear with his hands behind his head,
underneath a blazing old typewritten headline: Credits? What do they
mean, credits? I wrote the words. Thats it, isnt it?
One can almost imagine a small, strange, self-proclaimed pasty trolls voice
answering that last sarcastic question with, Except for me. And that voice
would be the voice of the words.
15
The Structural Units:
Jack White/Meg White
I'll Be Your Mirror
Friends are the siblings God never gave us.

Mencius
Nothing is improbable until it moves into the past tense.

George Ade
The perpetually irascible satirist-sage Frank Zappa once observed that rock
journalism is all about people who cant write, interviewing people who cant
think, for people who cant read. Well, the first and third categories exempt
us, dear reader, and the young fourth-generation inheritors of the big shiny
sound unearthed by 60s progenitors such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones,
The Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, and Velvet Underground,
are often far cannier than one might at first imagine.
This seems to be the case with the hyper-articulate Jack White. Whats true
of most musicians, the axiom that once set apart from their songs themselves
they are rendered somewhat mute, especially on the subject of exactly how
they do what they do, can never apply to Mr. White, the inventor of a curious
music machine called The White Stripes. He has even been clever enough to
invent his followup band already. He has obviously taken the trouble to learn
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some key dance steps from the avant-garde of the other arts, not just confine
himself to a musical playground, or to becoming a living museum of rock
music. He has the smart-ass savvy of an intellectual who uses music as a tool
under several names, bands, and personas. But a tool to do what with has yet
to be fully explained. Hes still in the process of conducting his experiment.
More than a decade into their career, their highly successful brand of
deconstruction-blues-rock seems to be deepening and darkening with each
successive album, now six in all, as they undertake a single-handed recapitulation of a century of popular American music. Make that double-handed, since
this duo-band consists only of an eccentric drummer, his ex-wife Meg, and
the eccentric guitarist himself, the one who channels acres of multiple instrumentation through one electric waterfall of distortion. Electricity and power
are Jacks best friends.
White, a peculiarly millennial figure who could not have arisen at any
other time in our collective cultural history, is that rare artist who, like Dylan,
changes the environment around himself by doing nothing other than his job,
but by doing it really well. He is the phantom performer who takes an ice pick
to the frozen chunks of todays corporate music industry, and, of course, they
applaud him for doing so, because he wins Grammys for them. They never
mind the bite on their hands they receive when feeding him, since those
hands always end up stuffed with mega-cash.
This is how White announced his end-of-the-century manifesto, in the 2000
liner notes to The White Stripes second album De Stijl:
When ideas become too complicated, and the pursuit of perfection is misconstrued as a need for excess. When there is so much involved that individual
components cannot be discerned. When it is hard to break the rules of excess,
then new rules need to be established. It descends back to the beginning
where the construction of things visual or aural is too uncomplicated to not
be beautiful. But this is done in the knowledge that we can only become
simple to a point and then there is nowhere else to go. There are definite natural things which cannot be broken down into lesser components. Even if the
goal of achieving beauty from simplicity is aesthetically less exciting, it may
force the mind to acknowledge the simple components that make the complicated beautiful.1
Every so often, someone has to come along and rejuvenate rock and pop
music, and it seems to have been The White Stripes turn this time around.
In the 60s, it was The Beatles who revolutionized what a pop song could be
and what it could mean, by pushing the envelope of personal expression
and technical virtuosity as far as it could go, and maybe farther, making
the studio into an additional band component, and making their brilliant
The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White
173
producer into a kind of invisible band member. Now, at least to these ears,
Jack White has declared that new rules need to be established and has gone
some distance towards establishing them. He has also done so with a heavy
dose of irony, since he has made breaking the rules of excess into an art
form itself, while at the same time painting music that on the surface is
deceptively basic and simple. His music is not simple; it is an incredibly
complicated matter to achieve something so primal and primitiveand so
privatein public.
In this new century, still a foreign country really, it appears that a character
who started out as John Gillis, and paired with his soon-to-be ex-wife/still
friend-partner, the idiosyncratic drummer Meg White, for whom Mr. Gillis
changed his name to Jack White, has somehow managed to rejuvenate rock
music, but by taking it backwards. This is indeed music as manifesto, something
akin to both the futurist and vorticist movements in experimental visual art.
After the couples divorce, and in the best musical, if not marital, tradition
of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, they stayed together for the sake of
their exotic creative bond in a musical collaboration called The White Stripes.
Enjoying and encouraging the fabricated narrative that they were actually
siblings, that the only other member of The White Stripes was his big sister,
or possibly just a good friend, the fledgling character created by John Gillis
began to quickly consolidate his position as a retrograde postmodernist
genius. The future, he declared, lies in the past of the blues, but turned way,
way Up.
First of all, he can play up a storm, incorporating both bass guitar and
rhythm guitar into the torrential force field of his own astonishingly proficient lead guitar, in a hyper-aggressive manner that I havent seen or heard
since Rahsaan Roland Kirk did it with several saxophones in the avantgarde jazz field back in the 60s.
Jack White has plundered brilliantly, and only from the besthe has
synthesized the preceding five decades of rock n roll through a Motor City
anger machine of his own meticulous and Buckingham-like creation, second
only to Iggy Pop for sheer rage quotient, and he has packaged his own
persona(s) in a highly confident manner for one so young.
But then, it was at that magic age, 24, the age of The Beatles members when
they peaked, and the age of Amy Winehouse when her music wove her dark
damaged magic over the Grammys in 2007, that White hit his stride.
While the wickedly talented Ms. Winehouse was wolfing down five
Grammys for virtually the best new everything, The White Stripes were
accorded top honors for two major categories, Best Alternative Rock Record
for Icky Thump, and Best Alternative Rock Performance by a Group (or in their
case, a dynamic duo) for the same record.
If Winehouse appears to have rejuvenated the solo artist who sings
achingly personal material in a blistering spotlight (now if we can only rejuvenate Ms. Winehouse), then in rock music, The White Stripes appear to have
rejuvenated a relatively new tradition in its second or third stage of
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reiteration, and they have apparently saved it in an unlikely and unexpected

mannerby stripping it of all pretension, perfection, and technical prowess.
The Beatles famous failure, Let It Be, essentially the tortured Get Back
Sessions of 1969 prior to the triumphant return of George Martin for a final
masterpiece, Abbey Road, was an ironic attempt to do precisely what the Jack
White character contrived by John Gillis succeeded in doing at the turn of the
last century. But The Beatles attempted their aesthetic experiment far too soon
in history, and far too late in their own corrosive interpersonal relationships.
Being true visionaries, they were even ahead of their time in their desire to
get back to the original roots of their own musical style, the style of playing
up-tempo blues without technological wizardry, seeking their own exotic
form of rhythmic folk music, the kind we eventually called progressive rock.
They didnt realize that the music industry had yet to expand itself up to
super-scale dimensions, if only in order for the industry to catch up with
what those four amazing artists had initiated. Their prescience backfired on
them. But for Jack White, the time was just right for a dramatic return to even
more hard-core blues motifs that had been cleverly hidden beneath the shiny
surface of pop music, at least as it evolved and was mutated in the hands of
The Four.
But Best Alternative to what?, some listeners might fairly ask. The answer
is: alternative to absolutely everything that has been produced since Chuck
Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and of course, The Beatles.
In order to move radically forward, White and his quirky ex-wife drummer
Meg have stepped way, way back into the shadows of the treacherous emotional experiment known as the singer-songwriter in a partnership.
This pair of singer-songwriters appeared to have a head start on all those
other famously repeated dual-patterns, where two creative artists become so
close in collaborative musical partnership that they might as well be siblings.
John and Paul, Mick and Keith, Roger and Pete, Lindsey and Stevie, Paul
and Art, Elton and Berniethey all simulated the close intimacy supposedly
associated with fraternal and infernal creativity. But since our age has lost
much of the utopian flavor that spiced up the last half of the twentieth
century, The White Stripes actually are pretending to be siblings, and the best
of friends, when of course they are neither one nor the other, and they are thus
delivering their raw goods already deconstructed for us, to save us all the
trouble.
The public simply loves their pretend brother-sister hybrid personas in this
quirky two-person, electrified-blues-band format, as does the fervent cult that
has long since grown around them, and it hardly seems to matter that
actually they were a married couple and are now a divorced coupleone
which uniquely formulated itself into an exotic partnership capable of rivaling any of the other gargantuan oddities contained in this book. Unlike the
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hopeful Beatles, who eventually became submerged in their own myth,

The White Stripes have adopted a defiantly postmodern and hopeless stance
and have thus arrived pre-mythologized as part of their own sardonic selfpackaging. They come post-obsolescent. Such is our age, that we are looking
at them looking backwards at us, towards the beginning, not the end.
For those readers not yet enlisted in the cult of The Whites (and I use this
word in the best possible sense of its meaning, like the following that gathers
around a true visionary such as Don Van Vliet, who created the performing
persona of Captain Beefheart about 40 years ago to say things that Don could
never say, and whose ferocious music is the most similar to Jack Whites
youll ever hear), a brief history of the duos marvelously entertaining histrionics is called for at this point.
Both hail from Detroit and were born Meg White and John Gillis in 1974 and
1975, respectively. They married in 1996, they formed The White Stripes in
1997, and released their initial music on actual alternative labels until they were
absorbed into the musical mainstream by an industry and audience that had
grown weary of the digital sameness of so many big contemporary corporate
bands that had their own brands to feed.
They divorced in 2000 and made that familiar deal with the devil at the
crossroads, in order to continue creating music.
If the British blues genius Peter Green hadnt lost his marbles and his confidence by the end of the 1960s, his own musical direction may very well have
paralleled that of Jack White. His writing and playing on Then Play On (1970),
especially the majestic Oh Well, has haunting similarities to Whites own
recent song from Icky Thump (2008), Little Cream Soda, in which he combines
a viral vehemence, as he laments losing one quality of himself after another,
with dystopian disappointment, until eventually he is as free as. . .nothing
at all.
As principal songwriter, guitarist, pianist, and vocalist, the sinister Jack-doll
pulls us all through a variety of failed romances and conflicts with modern life
itself, while his drummer and percussionist Meg, who also doubles as a vocalist, thumps her way through the history of pounding-it-out, from Ringo Starr,
whose old band she creatively channels, to John Bonham, whose old band she
evokes with a torrid empathy all her own.
This girl can really hit! Although its in an odd, Shaggs-like manner merged
with the style of the late Buddy Miles, as if she must hurriedly build the leantwo shack that Jack then jumps on and proceeds to kick to pieces with his
high-wire scream and breathtakingly shrill lava guitarit definitely rocks in
the most muscular sense of the word. If Pete Townshend had formed a new
band after The Who first ended, and if it had been just him on all guitars at once
and Keith Moon, in drag, playing drums (slowed down to match Megs
hypnotic and heavy heartbeat style), the band would have sounded like this
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back to basics garage-style rock bandThe White Stripesthat sometimes

makes even Nirvana sound slick and sentimental.
Whites ability to concoct brilliant cover versions of other artists songs, as
well as his ability to produce the work of other artists and participate in multiple ancillary projects, sets him apart from most singer-songwriters, those who
tend to stick to their own swimming pools.
Raw is the only word for the duos naked, low-fidelity sound and sensibility, equally inspired by punk, folk, and country music, but brought to a rapid
blues boil and flung in the air, so we can all watch the abrupt pattern shifts
and emotionally purple riffs as they spill all around us. This music is LOUD!
But I dont mean the word to convey volume, not at all, since, like The Beatles,
whose early music is still sparklingly loud whether the volume is high or low,
White Stripes music is emotionally loud, intellectually loud, sexually loud,
and even perhaps spiritually loud.
It is also saturated with the suburban rage that White perfected while still a
member of The Go. This was during the first two years of his White Stripes
experiment, and then he abandoned them for whiter pastures, merged with
Meg, and launched their debut in 1999, with music he called, Really angry
. . .the most raw, the most powerful, the most Detroit-sounding record
weve made.2 Shades of early MC5, sprinkled with some spices from The
Raconteursanother of Jacks persona playgrounds: a band-in-waiting solo
project, should he ever need one for backup. This is a clever lad; hes learned
his lessons well from his role models, and most certainly better than Amy
learned from hers.
Some people have referred to the White Stripes sound as punk-blues, and
that seems to be a good enough provisional name to describe the bands
anti-aesthetic crusade against the future. Indeed, for the concept of their
second release in 2000, Jack reached back to an avant-garde arts movement
of the 20s called De Stijl (the style) in order to implement a bare bones kind
of approach that hasnt been toyed with quite so creatively since Lindsey
Buckinghams 1979 sonic experiment, Tusk.
Buckingham and White have a good number of things in common, though
their style is not one of them, and Stevie and Meg also share something, in that
they were/are both part of a creative and intimate structural unit. The real
connection, though, is powerful producing skill, and that is what puts White
over the top when it comes to moving the history of music forward and sideways. This is ecologically sound blues-rock-folk music from hell, of the most
economical sort, something which hasnt quite been attempted since the fabled
Basement Tapes were recorded. Now, rather than have a whole gaggle of
zonked-out musical legends gather to party and record, just for fun, the hidden
folk music of America, we have just foxy anger-king Jack White and his incredibly cute thumper, Meg.
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De Stijl (2000), eschewed all varnish and decoration and aimed instead for
an essentialist revival of the roots-oriented hybrid favored by the early Who.
It was recorded on 8-track analogue equipment in Jack Whites home, another
similarity to both Buckingham and Brian Wilson, perhaps the most famous of
the technical innovators who used simplicity as the raw material for their
new musical directions.
The first real success came with the release of The White Stripes next two
albums, White Blood Cells (2001) and Elephant (2003), on which their skeletal
garage sound, mingled with the charm of their personal mythology surrounding primary colors, triad numbers, and appliance objects, contributed to a
buzz uncommon in todays jaded musical environment.
Elephant even provided them with what amounts to a hit single in Seven
Nation Army, but of the eccentric sort favored by few peers in a business
that has evolved, mutated, and morphed into a dimension of discontinuity,
based primarily on Cold Hard Cash, but also paradoxically inspiring a
dynasty of dissonance in which Radiohead, Arcade Fire, and Nine Inch Nails
can coexist with Amy Winehouse, P. J. Harvey, Bjork, and the fantastic
Lucinda Williams.
In 2004, Elephant won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album, while
the catchy little love anthem Seven Nation Army won for Best Rock Song.
Not alternative, just best Rock Song. Period. The change was underway. They
had somehow done what all great radical artists dothey move to the edge,
they declare it to be the center, and they force the industry to reorganize itself
around them. And that is exactly whats been happening with The White
Stripes, a band name I am convinced refers to the spaces in an early Dutch
modernist painting, usually mistakenly thought to be empty, when in actuality
they are not nothingthey are a piece of the color white.
While their music at first hearing appears to be missing certain elements, it

also has filled itself up to bursting with other elements in their place, and it is
carried forward by a genuine neurotic energy and attention surplus bordering on overload. The stripping bare process has allowed for the minimalist
content to be expanded to near architectural scale, and their unique sonic
signature to be magnified to near monumental scale.
Like Winehouse, Whites trademark is the desperate torch song, but
whereas Amys torch is nearly extinguished by her own tears, Whites torch
explodes into angry fireworks, because he appears to toss gasoline rather
than tears into the mix.
It is the blues taken to extremes, and beyond. He has the purples, and with
each album they get louder, heavier, and more menacing. The White Stripes,
who seem to be encountering some of their own private tribulations, with
Meg White suffering towards the end of 2007 from something publicists
called acute anxiety and having to cancel the remainder of the tour
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designed to support Icky Thump, their recent Grammy-award-winning monument to the art of making the simple sound as complicated as the complicated
is simple, are rocking on the rocks. At that time, there was public surmise as
to whether the structural units known by their shared surname would ever
be performing in public again.
These circumstances not only echo the eventual breakup of the band who
made all the other bands of today possible, The Beatles, they also evoke Whites
own modernist inspired motif for his musical paintings, and the
persona architecture that houses them, on stage and off. Method actors like
White dont suddenly leave their persona in the theatre; they bring it home to
practice and experiment with it in everyday life, which makes one wonder
about the dynamics of the White householdfire-haired supermodel mom
and permanent iconoclast Jack White, as performed by John Gillis.
Icky Thump is a remarkable record indeed, and Jack Whites commentary on
the liner notes, a kind of poisoned-pen love letter to the world in general, is
worth taking seriously as the crystallized insights of a restless but highly
innovative mind. Somewhat self-absorbed, it is true, but what else is new in
the realm of the dark mirror?
I saw an image of someone I once knew today and it made me write down my
first impressions. I dont normally tend to do that. Guess that makes me an
Impressionist. I do like impressions though. I once saw a man completely
impersonate another man who was not unlike myself if you thought about
it. Which I did. They make a symbol in sheet music when the writer wants
you to keep playing until the cows come home, but I forget what its called.
I like that idea though. Whats the longest it could go on? When theres world
record for something, its an extreme thing. How big is the biggest of its kind?
And how did it get to the point where the conditions called for something so
massive to be constructed? Its baffling. Beautiful though. Icky Thump.3
Icky Thump is a Welsh phrase meant to evoke something truly unusual and
rare, to which we are taken aback.
Some singer-songwriter mirrors are so cloudy we can barely see anything

inside. Cloudy isnt necessarily the same as dark, but the end effect on us is
similar. Brian Wilsons mirror reflected our longing for the pure state of being
which we mistakenly think of as nostalgia for childhood, when it is actually
nostalgia for a future we have lostchildhoods end. There are multiple ways
to break the blues, or to try to do so. Some do it by singing the blues, like John
Mayalls Bluesbreakers, for instance, or Mayalls kids,the early Fleetwood Mac. Others, like Wilson, try to happy themselves practically to death.
Still other singer-songwriters, equally immersed in woe, tend to shift their
attention towards a different response, one more capable of providing a much
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needed defensethe sarcasm of sardonic humor, calculated to bring us face

to face with the darkness and, at the same time, make us laugh at it outright.
This kind of blues-breaker comprises a group as varied as Harry Nilsson,
Randy Newman, and to some extent, even Frank Zappa. They exhort us to
laugh, or maybe sneer, in the face of fate, but we discover only too quickly
that it only hurts when we laugh. In response, they ask us to look into the
ways that a smile can hide the horror.
Humor has always had a subtle but hidden role to play in popular musics
means of communicating important social issues. The best historical illustration of this is perhaps the peculiar synchronicity of performers such as Spike
Jones and his City Slickers and the rock satirist par excellence, Zappa. They
both decided to utilize the funhouse mirror. And we see, especially when
studying Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, that the ability to provoke
controversy and change through parody is a skillful and incisive weapon.
In their cases, they wield a sharp social scalpel in exactly the same manner that
a great writer such as Jonathan Swift used a pen, and for exactly the same
reasons.
In Jack Whites case, his probing satirical scalpel is usually leveled at both
the hand that feeds him, the record and music industry and its historical
structure, and the romantic object of his affection.
The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Led Zeppelin are the groups that most
informed and inspired (and still do today) the mayhem of Jack White. Those
classic groups have remained messy, mad and bad in spirit, even if time is
eating away at their biting impact.
A quick listen to The Whos early songs such as Here Tis, Zoot Suit,
and Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere instantly shows us the grail that White
sought for and found in his Detroit garage, and which he mixed even more
violently with his own personal musical messiahs, the black and blue sound
of Blind Willie McTell, Son House, Robert Johnson, and Howlin Wolf.
Listening to The White Stripes, all two of them, perform Son Houses
Death Letter live in concert is an incendiary experience that leaves you
wondering exactly how White managed to get away with this supernatural
concoction of everything that came before him into a massive mountain of
sound colliding with a dangerous toying with rock star personas etched
in stone.
It is difficult to find comparable parallels to what White seems to be accomplishing when he tears down and rebuilds the traditions that make him
possibly the most unlikely star. His entire mask is one of disdain for stardom
and the deep disillusionment inherently embedded in the postmodern
sarcasm of twenty-firstcentury pop culture.
However, the creative parallels here are perfectly clear if we look just a little
further afield: Charlie Parker and Miles Davis in jazz; Charles Ives and Erik
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Satie in classical; James Joyce in literature; Pablo Picasso in painting; Frank

Lloyd Wright in architecture; Robert Johnson in blues music; and Neil Young
first in folk music and then in electric anthems. Especially in the case of
Youngs angry and brilliant control of the raw electric lava at his disposal,
he is an artist strangely similar to White in temperature, if not styleone
who has certainly turned up the emotional volume on looking into the darkness and using the force of feeling as a weapon against the night.
Some early reviewers of The White Stripes have even compared their revolution to that caused by The Beatles abrupt style shift with the release of Rubber Soul, and definitely the about-face contained in their masterpiece, Revolver.
It is only after a protracted course of listening to all of their simple yet sophisticated music that one begins to twig to the fact that this may be more than a
mere fancy cooked up in a record reviewers overheated and solitary reverie.
The White Stripes did evolve from primitive beginnings to technical grandiosity within the span of creatively disparate but exhilarating songs and sounds,
and they developed a love affair with the press, especially the British press, in a
very Beatle-like manner. They have also lasted two years longer than the legendary ones, though lately one begins to wonder two things. How do they stylistically remain outsiders if they have become the consummate insiders? And,
how long can the interpersonal emotional bond of collaborative partnership
be sustained under the pressures exerted by massive celebrity as it collides
with deeply hidden self-doubt?
It happens to the best of them, nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, it did
happen to the best of themThe Beatlesand to every single other supernaturally gifted partnership in the annals of singer-songwriter history. Success can
submerge talent itself when the force that made the miracle possible in the
beginning, a gift for refreshing the core tradition, becomes another new tradition in itself. The cult of personality can paralyze fragile talents, even quirkily
gifted ones like certain drummers. The celebrity attached to the ascent becomes
too big to handle, too massive to move, too tantalizing to change, and too
rewarding to run away from.
So for The Whites, its back to black, but literally, back to the black beginnings
of rhythm and blues, ignited with punk sensibilities, and smothered in a thick
gravy of personal relationship demons. In other words, back to the blues as a
motif, a language, a style, but also as the kind of self-expression that needs to
refresh itself regularly at a fierce fountain of suffering in order to work.
White has gone down to the same crossroad that Prince and Hendrix
plugged into, gathering up a huge history of black guitar angst in his skinny
white arms, but luckily for him, and us, this young man can really play. And
thats what matters most, as per Peter Green, doomed founder of the original
Fleetwood Mac.
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White is a brilliant example of using a dingy mirror to great effect, using it

so well, in fact, that we see right under there with him, beneath the emotionally disturbing grime. Sometimes the bright lights can be blinding. Sometimes
ones partner is blinding.
The polarities and dualities inherent in the creative artist and audience
relationship are varied and vulnerable, just as the singer-songwriters themselves usually are, and sometimes a songwriting partnership can be as intimate as a marriage. Sometimes a marriage can become the basis for and the
entropy of a great songwriting team.
The personal relationship at the heart, perhaps the broken heart, of The
White Stripes reminds me of the lines written by another gifted dark mirror,
Lou Reed, cofounder of Velvet Underground: Ill be your mirror, reflect what
you are, in case you dont know. But it is more than gender polarity or
genius duality at work in all these dynamic songwriters, whether composing
alone or in tandem; it is almost a kind of unique personality paradigm at
work in the unconscious of our culture. All these singer-songwriters, especially Jack White, are salesmen (and salesladies) for the Unconscious.
These artists are exploring the potential for words and music as a transcendental force that can cure existential angst. There is both a terrible sadness
and a blissful glee in the art and craft of such explorers of the darkness.
Many are depressive troubadours whose often triumphant but tragic lives
were a veritable cautionary tale for any singer-songwriters willing, or foolish
enough, to slip into the dizzying sanctuary of solipsism, one of the chief perils to which all poets, and in particular many singer-songwriters, are prone.
Jack is gifted, he might be a postmodern impressionist, but hes also most
certainly a good old-fashioned depressionist, writing his way out of his
own deep well, after descending voluntarily so he could sing back his
reports to us.
One of our finest dark poets, Leonard Cohen, expressed a similar statement
about the ancient craft in his Tower of Song. There he asks Hank Williams
bluntly, how lonely does it get? Instead of an answer, however, all that the
questioner hears in reply is Hank Williams coughing, high above, in the
tower of song.4
The White Stripes appear to be intentionally playing with rock persona
stereotypes, melting the masks invented by their own ancestral icons of rock
music in order to reinvent the genre. Despairing rock-poets like White, by
plunging all the way to the bottom of their subjectivity, remarkably still somehow manage to serve as perfect emblems for the entire singer-songwriter phenomenon, both its pathology and its paradox. By dipping down so deep into
the personal, they succeed in arriving at a universal messagean objective
reality that all of us can share, relate to, project upon, listen to, sing along with,
and make love or fall asleep to. The Whites, like all the other dark mirrors,
somehow manage to do what the most successful singer-songwriters always
do, no matter what their stylethey articulate something that we want them
to say on our behalf; they say what we would say, if we only could.
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We listen to the tales woven, the dreams told, the seductions shouted, and the
parties thrown by attending to the unique words of pawnbrokers, confidence
men, coal miners, and ventriloquists who throw their diverse and distressing
voices at us. Fueled by a duality and polarity at the heart of any creative enterprise, the singer-songwriter phenomenon, which has indeed already had its
classical rise and fall, is one of those unique and deep mysteries that makes
listening to music so magical. And that same internal dinergy still makes songs
the most powerful means of conveying a feeling from one person to another, or
to millions of others.
The White Stripes seem to be fulfilling something of the promise that The
Beatles were only able to reach for, since The Beatles wildly succeeded musically but not dynamically through the ongoing interplay of a collaborative
partnership. Or at least not dynamically for an extended period of time, given
the intense emotional heat of Beatlemania. A whole decade of The White
Stripes, a 10-year terrorist-saturated stretch that overlaps with the new
millennium, perhaps indicates that there still is, after all, a method to the
madness of sustaining a close personal creative partnership based on reciprocal maintenance. How else can we explain the origins and trajectory of their
remarkably quirky career?
Their new functionalist approach and the minimalist music that

results consists of a daring maneuver, where all surface decoration has been
eschewed in favor of a full frontal attack of high-voltage simplicity, with each
album being another chapter in an ongoing manifesto delivered to the ears
before the mind. This is different from the other form of late twentiethcentury avant-garde music known as minimal (Riley, Young, Reich, Glass).
The ear experiences something that can obviously only be referred to as maximal when we listen to The Whites.
As simple as their latest music may seem at first, it remains to be seen and
heard whether the basic components of emotive composition laid bare by
White can accumulate enough insight to be shared by larger and larger
numbers of people, without changing its core values. There is also the danger
for White that, like Winehouse, he might become so ensconced in his admittedly hermetic kingdom that he too veers perilously close to the edge of isolation, solipsism, and utter self-absorption.
Unless, of course, those are the very territories from which he launched
himself when he first began. After all, consider the procedural leitmotif and
ongoing process of his unraveling personal traumas of the heart, in the best
tradition of the torch singer, but also appreciate the dangerously selfenclosed world he occupies. Perhaps it is Jack White and not John Gillis
who says and does these things (just the way it was Dylan and not Zimmerman who said and did what that lightning in a body accomplished as far back
as 1962).
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The lyrical liturgy that White embeds within his torrents of blues lava flow
is an obscure and highly personal one, much as Lennons was and Townshends still is, but with White, we enter a whole new stage of publicprivate persona play, one that can only be called, in keeping with the age in
which we live and the era that spawned him, a postmodern dark mirror with
a philosophical bent. His song lyrics are a veritable catalogue of conflicts, a
love search in perpetual peril.
From the very first album, The White Stripes (1999), we were deluged with a
big sound that was beautiful in spite of its own strategies for offending, with
astonishing renditions of blues classics like Robert Johnsons Stop Breaking
Down sandwiched between two White originals. Those songs formed a
devastating triad.
With lyrics every bit as hyper-personal as Winehouses are, but with a more
secure sense of his grasp of a living avant-garde tradition, White has an
obscure and reclusive meaning that hides behind each song. Propelled by a
wave of pure energy, nasal howling, and truly phenomenal guitar playing,
the song is clever enough and fast enough to stay just ahead of meaning.
In other words, it grabs us by the throat and we start willingly traveling along
with it, long before we wonder what it all means.
This is one of the key secrets of a great songfacilitating comprehension
before understanding, or perhaps before delivering precognitive meaning is
a better description of such a truly transcendental occurrence. Its also one
of the secrets that made John Lennon a great singer-songwritergreat, even
though occasionally his elliptical lyrics were carried by a strangely rough
and unconventional singing voice. White has that same kind of merger
between misanthropic yet hauntingly human insights and the animal magnetism of a weird but wonderful throat.
On occasion, White will use that voice to throw rage back in the face of
perceived abuse of power, as in the third song (on their first record), The Big
Three Killed My Baby, in which he skewers the American dream as choreographed by giant automobile manufacturers like those who once ruled Whites
home town, and once even ruled the world: 30,000 wheels are rollin and my
stick shift hands are swollen, everything involved is shady, the big three killed
my baby.
He concludes by pleading for giant industries not to feed his planned obsolescence and declaring that he is about to have another blowout. Musically,
and as a blisteringly hip metaphor for this millennium, Jack White is the
sound of the tires on the wheels of rock n roll blowing out after being
retreaded one too many times by giant monster bands. He returns down the
long road of American music, far on the other side of that familiar crossroad
where Robert Johnson first made his Paganni-like bargain with the devil in
order to play up a storm, but only for a very short lifetime.
After all, listen to I Fought Pirhanas. After a few hearings you begin to
realize that this is the essence of blues music, no matter who plays itthe
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personification of pain in music. This is definitely one of the greatest blues

songs Ive ever heard in my life. Its living death.
Jack White seems to have figured out how to sustain the show without
melting down, at least for a decade now, unless the recent Meg meltdown of
acute anxiety that inhibited the duos travel is the first rumbling of the underground pressures at work inside this band. But he has a long-range plan;
White has married a red-haired supermodel named Karen Elson, and marrying a supermodel is definitely making a down payment on a long-term reality
investment of time and energy.
His supermodel wife entered the picture shortly after he split with Meg.
He kept Megs name, of course, because it was now the name of a famous
rock star that he channels. It was actually Meg who enthusiastically insisted
that Jack propose to his girlfriend. Not many of our ex-lovers manage to be
so important to us that we not only stay in the business of making music
together, we also follow their advice regarding matters of the heart.
But then, Meg White is not your average ex-wife/big sister/best friend/
musical partner. Shes definitely not your average drummer either. In fact,
many Stripes fans are constantly complaining about her rudimentary but
nonetheless enigmatic and alluring skills. The best one can say about her
style, apart from finding her incredibly cute, as I do myself, is that she
perfectly blends into and balances the Jack-dolls histrionic brilliance. If The
White Stripes had a normal drummer, the chemical compound would not
be the same, kind of like the Ringo factor, and that is precisely what makes
them eligible for the dark mirror award for reciprocal maintenance in the
twenty-first century.
And just at the end of that last century, with an eponymously titled debut
record that was as revolutionary as it was appetizing, Jack White began to
make an exhibition of himself, quite literally. He was already banging on the
door of the future we now occupy, the first decade of which has brought a
soundtrack from him.
If the wrinkle that is in your brain has given you quite a sting, your fingers
have become a crane, pulling on these puppet strings, he laments in Sugar
Never Tasted So Good (from The White Stripes album), announcing that
romance is going to feel different in the new age. He also declares himself
personally, introducing to us a nihilistic character who will subsequently
return from album to album.
For White, characters are a device, just as they were for Lennon. They also
provide a way for him to hide safely behind the armor his sensitivity requires
or demands of him, and White has remarked that such characters allow him,
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or even compel him, through his exploration of them, to know himself better.
I feel better myself already.
The record that followed, in the first millennial year, was a utopia gone
awry. Named after the 1917 Dutch avant-garde art movement created by the
great Theo Van Doesberg, De Stijl (2000) was indeed the declaration of and
manifesto for a new style of rock music. White really begins to loosen up with
this one, leaving the punk steam a little in the background and cranking up
the blues lava to an alarming and ecstatic degree.
In the searing Hello Operator, he pleads with some kind of celestial or
demonic power to control his communication problems. Find a canary, a
bird to bring my message home, carry my obituary, my coffin doesnt have a
phone. In the majestic version of Son Houses classic Death Letter, it
becomes instantly clear why White has been lauded by public, industry, and
critics alike as a savior (of sorts) for the rock myth. This is the staggering point
where one realizes how good a guitarist he really is, and where the color of
his skin suddenly vanishes, just as Peter Greens did, all those years ago.
Just as my appreciation for Whites guitar genius was slow in coming, it
took a similarly long time for me to admit how marvelous a player Lindsey
Buckingham is, suggesting that maybe the best of the best are not ever
destined to be immediate deliveries. The best always take a little longer to
sink and lodge in the soul. But once there, they force their way back onto
the surface of our awareness rapidly, upon awaking each morning and before
we can even get out of bed. If weve been listening properly, that song, whatever it is, starts playing again inside our brain.
A song like the White Stripes Truth Doesnt Make a Noise seems to be
capable of that kind of effect. There, White weeps over his lovers heart of
stone, as well as the fact that shes constantly picked on. The narrator seems
likely to be guilty of that kind of abuse himself. She gives blank stares in
return for his sympathetic advice. But then again, her stare is louder than
her voice, because truth doesnt make a noise.
Other times its the schizophrenic inclusion of a Blind Willie McTell song,
Your Southern Can is Mine, to deviate from what, up to that point, had
seemed a seamless homage to the electric form of towering rage. But by
including it, in a peculiar down-home and warped party vibe, they have
secured their place as the masters of irony, for the moment. But then, the
moment is all the group really cares about, which, in fact, is why they might
end up being surprisingly timeless and universal. Historys funny that way.
Speed of recording is another return to the past which the band employs to special and profound effect. De Stijl was recorded in Jacks living room in the blink of
an eye and perhaps a wink at Brian Wilson and Buckingham, two other obsessively creative homebodies who have each informed the White ethos in ways that
lurk below the surface and have more to do with psychology than with technology.
White Blood Cells (2001) marked the arrival of a full-fledged cult around the
band, creating that rare supercharged heat that every so often anoints someone as the messiah of modern music. It was Jacks turn. This is rarely a
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comfortable place for any creative artist to be, since the loftiest work is
usually made with complete indifference to the cash register.
Their next album, Elephant (2003) was recorded in two weeks at Toerag
Studios in London. The 2005 followup to that, Get Behind Me Satan, was also
recorded in two weeks, but with each creative venture they consolidated their
production values and became ever so slightly more sophisticated, despite
the outward gloss of primitive anti-industry aesthetics. Their frenzied
production speed is matched by a parallel looseness in performance, with
no two gigs being even remotely similar, due to Jacks instinctual choice of
what comes next and also how long the given solos are in any given show,
which is unofficially known as what comes during. All the best dark mirrors
deviate right there in the middle, right before our very eyes.
2004 was the beginning of their annual pilgrimage to pick up Grammys, for
best rock song, or best alternative music album, or best rock performance, or
all at once, and with Elephant, they seemed to hit creative pay dirt in a way
that also translated into global sales output.
Elephant is both a musical and a communicative masterpiece that heralds the
arrival of a mature talent, one who has gotten used to the sudden rush of
adrenalin associated with overnight success and is comfortable having his rock
star status hammered into submission by the artist-master. So far, so good.
And it has been good, and getting better all the time. The only serious
question is one similar to that surrounding Winehouse, but for very different
reasons. How long can the emotional intensity associated with angry struggle
be sustained in the midst of capitalist splendor, a supermodel wife, and a
reputation as the shape-shifting prophet of a future musical age? Weve
heard that assessment before, of course, in the cases of Dylan and Lennon,
but in their cases it sadly turned out to be trueperhaps it always is. But
White seems to have resolved that particular dilemma, and given his rapid rise
and ongoing evolution, we owe the gifted and mercurial Mr. White more than
a benefit of the doubt to see where he takes the carnival of conflict from here.
I trust him, for some frightening reason, to make good on his promise, even
if it drives him mad. Dont worry Jack, well be there to catch you (or at least
watch with great interest if you fall) because, like we do with Winehouse, we
want to emphasize how much we enjoy your talents. But we also need to
remind you that the culture likes to watch people sing about drowning, yet
we dont actually want to see someone really drown, do we?
The Jack-doll is the same kind of talented confidence man who occasionally
visits another gifted trickster-artist, David Bowie, in a different guise but with
similarly spectacular and inspiring songs and performances that take place at
the same emotional temperature. His character in Seven Nation Army, the
fierce opener to Elephant, shrieks Im gonna fight em off, a seven nation
army couldnt hold me back as the combat anthem in his losing battle with
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forces who will eventually bleed him drythis is a character who bears
watching.
Few writers can provide commentary on the creative act of writing a song
while still immersed in the craft and creation of it, but White is warning us
of a drought yet to come, a point in the journey when the words are going
to bleed out of him until he wont have to think anymore. Even fewer dark
mirrors would characterize their craft so compellingly as writing away their
need to think, whether about sorrows or joys.
Not many songs capture the hyper-personal essence of the blues quite so
grippingly as Ball and Biscuit, also from Elephant. Its the guitar-playing
and animal snarl present there that etch Whites burning venom into the wailing wall of American blues. In a propulsive but ambiguous sequence of
thoughts, he proclaims himself his lovers third man (possibly), as well as
the seventh son (definitely), and then goes on threateningly: right now
you could care less about me, but soon enough you will care. Whites more
than just the seventh son though; hes the seventeenth seventh son!
With The White Stripes next album, Get Behind Me Satan (2005), they
entered a pantheon reserved for the very rare artists whose artifacts somehow
manage to sum up an age, whether we like it or not, in a way that is wildly
self-indulgent, commercially huge, and yet artistically advanced and
revealing at the same time.
Robert Hilburn, the Los Angeles Times staff writer responsible for keeping
his eyes on the edge, had this to say in between gasps of praise: Inspired
and determined, Jack White gets personal, crafting a White Stripes CD so
surprising it recalls The Beatles creative leap on Rubber Soul.5
The most surprising thing about certain so-called alternative artists is that
they also, on rare occasions, reflect the times we live in so well that they
achieve staggering sales success while still being on the edge. This is proof
that some follow the old avant-garde adage that advises the most daring
artists to move to the edge, declare it to be the center, and wait with a stern
expression. Hilburn goes on to say,
A daring creative advance in which he and drummer Meg White have added
layers of imagination and depth to what was already a thrilling new sound.
Despite all the gloom surrounding the record industry at the way bottomline consciousness at major labels stifling creativity, White shows how a
fiercely independent artist can still make music that is both cutting edge and
commercial. White sets aside his signature blistering guitar lines on most of
the tracks, marimbas dominate one song, grand piano and/or drums highlight others, and he mixes them in dazzlingly original ways.6
Original, and certainly the most caustic dark mirror thus far, in terms of
sharing intimate stories of woe is me romance, an even deeper blues spirit
mashed together with even heavier but somehow smoother textures, leaving
the semblance of punk disdain but varnished ever so lightly with a faint coat
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of accessibility. Maybe its just that, against all our better instincts, we actually
end up liking the Jack character, even though we know it might not be good
for us to be his friend.
Throughout these song-maps to a territory of loss, it is Whites humor, his
wildly inventive voice, and his magical guitar that keep him from drowning
in the self-pity blues. Instead, he is ready, willing, and able to surf the hellwave as expertly as Duane Allman, though less pretty sounding, and as
proficiently as Jimmy Page, though only slightly less narcissistic. Feedback
is Jacks friend, and he shakes its raw hand with the grasp of a master.
According to Hilburn,
There was a child-like innocence to much of the Stripes music and even their
red and white peppermint outfits. But the new songs are more complex, more
wary, more revealingas White struggles, sometimes with Biblical imagery,
over classic matters of integrity, honor and temptation. I dont need any of
your pity, he snarls in one song, Ive got plenty of my own! In singing
about betrayal and rejection, hes not exempting himself from guilt. There
are times in the songs when he could be alluding to his own misdeeds as
easily as someone elses.7
But we always need to remember that with all dark mirrors, its impossible
to tell the difference between the songwriter and the character he or she
embodies temporarily. They are all someone else already, and permanently.
With their most recent release, Icky Thump (2007), another Grammy grabber,
The White Stripes have consolidated their hold on todays music scene with a
nervous and pale fist. Whether they can consolidate the apparent cracks in
the armor of their collaborative partnership is another question. One hopes
so, for the obvious and selfish reason that more music is required. Or is it that
their job is now done after a decade, and the task has been passed to someone
else to up the ante even further? As in, Ill call your Icky Thump, and raise
you my. . ..
But how does one top Icky Thump? Its possibly the heaviest record Ive heard
in years, and thats taking into account that I still have the ringing in my ears
from live Who and Led Zeppelin concerts. This little gem of a record, recorded
in a whole three weeks (while some star status bands take up to three years these
days), has proven to be their most melodic swim through mayhem in some
time. It also contains one of my favorite and very rare examples of Meg getting
a chance to sing a few words, harmonizing on St. Andrew (The Battle Is in
the Air), a truly strange song about abandonment that reaches for and achieves
new heights of existential angst, but without the usual prerequisite howling.
If we are lucky, we could see another studio album round about 2009. Ironically, they now face a problem shared by Amy Winehouse. How do they top
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themselves once theyve reached an almost supernaturally creative peak?

Where do they go from here, and how do they satisfy the bottomless appetite
of our entertainment expectations?
In the meantime, in March 2008, The Raconteurs speedily released their
second record, Consolers of The Lonely, featuring Jack White, which means he
must have been cooking up this little surprise dish before, during, and after
winning those Grammys for Icky Thump, and therefore right in the midst of
his partner Megs condition of acute anxiety that prevented travel, performance, or interview.
The Raconteurs first album, Broken Boy Soldiers (2006), was a little bit of
relaxation that Jack White engaged in while resting between his own White
Stripes projects, Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan. Beginning to get a clear
picture? Now, we have Consolers of The Lonely to console us, so to speak,
should there be no more Stripes music to follow.
Pity about the cute, anxiety-ridden drummer. Clever lad though. Synchronicity? Or just the dark mirror reflecting itself back at itself, and back at us?
There is an utterly fantastic term that I must enlist at this point to describe
White as the most emblematic of all the dark mirrors, whether in solo or partnership format. The dynamic at play is enantiomorphism, and its easier to
understand than it sounds. Jack White is an enantiomorph par excellence.
The terms comes from Greek enantios, meaning opposite, and morphe,
meaning form. An enantiomorph is described as: either of a pair of objects
related to each other as the right hand is to the left, that is, as mirror images
that cannot be reoriented so as to appear identical.
Both the Meg White/White Stripes combination and The Raconteurs can be
defined as a racemate: a mixture of equal quantities of two enantiomorphs, or
substances that have dissymmetric molecular structures that are mirror
images of one another. Each enantiomorph rotates the plane of polarization
of plane-polarized light through a characteristic angle, but, because the rotatory effect of each component exactly cancels that of the other, the mixture is
not super-imposable. Though identical, they are opposites.
Thus we arrive at an even more appropriate word, given the context of
singer-songwriters in tandem or alonethat of resolution. I have referred to
the pairs of partners in all great musical collaborations as parts of a chemical
compound, whether it be the individual Beatles, the individual White Stripes,
or The Raconteurs, Whites replacement band-in-waiting, and this is the
grandest and most operatic example of all.
In chemistry, resolution is any process by which a mixture called a racemate is separated into its two constituent enantiomorphs, or pairs of substances that have dissymmetric arrangements of atoms and structures that are
non-super-imposable mirror images of one another. Basically the equation is
as follows. White Stripes equals Jack White equals Raconteurs equals Jack
White.
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The fact that music that is basically the blues (even that ratcheted up to the
purple rafters like The White Stripes music) is so popular must be a sign of
the times we are living through. Again, the white part of the abstract paintings so loved by the brilliant John Gillis is often thought to be the empty part,
but what if it isnt? What if white is a color after all, and what if the empty part
is the part with the most potential, because the full part is already full?
The Stripes may have become full, while The Raconteurs, an equally
talented unit that includes his old friend Brendan Benson, a rollicking group
of lads who definitely excel at telling stories and anecdotes effectively, if
loudly, are only just beginning to fill up quite nicely. But theres plenty of Jack
left to go around and for them to fuel up and move fast forward into the gap
left behind, if The White Stripes should go missing. Thats one thing we can
be sure ofthere will always be plenty of Jack.
If only the primitive genius of John Lennon and the gifted polish of Paul
McCartney had found a way to cooperate together creatively while also
coming and going into projects outside the structural unit of their initial band.
But this is a postmodern idea. And were also talking about a very smart
young musician. It is anti-brand on the surface, and all-brand underneath.
Lennon and McCartney were the ultimate enantiomorphic binary unit in
our musical history. If only they had been able to cooperate and come and
go at the same time, then The Beatles may have survived even longer,
fostering the growth of the individual identities within the unit for the benefit
of the collective identity that brought them together in the first place.
If those formative pop visionaries had somehow been able to learn the
lesson that it seems their youthful inheritors could only have absorbed
30 years later, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, then they
may have lasted as long as The White Stripes have, and as long as The Raconteurs might. So, to Jack White, in the hopes that his restless and multifaceted
creativity might continue apace, and in the esteemed words of one of the
darkest of the dark mirrors, here we are nowentertain us.
Afterword:
One's Company, Two's a Crowd
There has been a remarkable musical revolution, actually several in succession,
and usually once every decade, since the post-60s era began, as if that tumultuous decade wasnt enough when it came to transforming the margins into the
mainstream. The truly staggering marriage of country music and blues, which
took place in 1956 at the hands of Chuck Berry, and in 1957 at the hands of Elvis
Presley, and gave birth to the rock n roll format inherited by the British masters
The Beatles, who perfected its radical mixed-race template, had by 1967 elevated
itself to incendiary levels of form, volume, content, and commercialism.
After that initial explosion, rock n roll then turned into rock music, which
eventually adopted a massive power base for delivering ever heavier sounds
and sentiments to bigger and bigger crowds, as exemplified so well by The
Who, Led Zeppelin, Cream, and others. It seemed like we all suddenly
needed a rejuvenating plunge back into the history of the musics roots
perhaps if only in order for the precursors and their inheritors to remain
relevant for both their original and newly expanding audiences.
In one sense, it was time for a return to basics, technical innovation having
been taken about as far as it could possibly go by innovative groups such as
Grateful Dead and Yes. In another sense, it was a case of the creative cycle
reincarnating some of the essence of what started the whole pop stampede
in the first place. The personal song, written and delivered by the writer
himself (or herself), was once again on the ascendant curve, having almost
been drowned out entirely by exhilarating experiments with astronomical
amplification and ever more ambiguous lyrical content.
The surprising source of the one such rejuvenation was the musical
locationthe location that had first inspired rhythm and blues artists to go on
a date with accelerated bluegrass traditionsthe country. Major rock musicians took a refreshing detour back to the country. The Byrds morphed into
the Flying Burrito Brothers, who influenced some of Grateful Deads most
compelling forays forwardtheir albums American Beauty and Workingmans
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Dead. In turn, those albums inspired the making of softer melodies by groups
such as America and, most famously and successfully, The Eagles.
But the newly minted tradition inherited from Dylan by todays most
compelling lyricist-musicians has also undergone a surprising mutation and
evolution in a totally different direction. This particular back to the roots
direction chose to embrace classical jazz and blues as its point of departure,
as exemplified so well by Amy Winehouse and Jack White. Still, and once
again, the only thing more difficult than doing the songwriting deed alone
is doing it with a creative partner.
In his remarkable study of creativity, The Duality of Vision, Walter Sorell
drew our attention to the powerful dynamics at work between genius, versatility, self-image, and the mystique of communication itself. He clearly
explored how the push and pull conflict between two great partners is also
found in the great solo artists, who often compete even, or especially, with
themselves alone, much to their occasional peril. These figures tend to internalize the struggle between introversion and extroversion most commonly
experienced by dual collaborators and accomplish their ends all by themselves. And they all have the solo scars to show for it. It is especially evident,
he pointed out, in cases where a master of one art form decides to branch out
and express him- or herself in a different but parallel medium.
Sorell was surprisingly stringent on the survivors and those who were lost
in their wake. All art is a rebellion against mans limitations and a triumph
of his greatness. Riches exist everywhere for the strong, temptations for the
weak. Only the would-be artist can suffer under the burden of an abundance
of talent.1
By that demanding yardstick, John Lennon would have to be considered
almost a failure, while Bob Dylan would be once more heralded as the true
Olympian he suddenly appears to be. Lennon buckled under the weight of
his own achievement in creating the most revolutionary group in pop music
history, yet Dylan somehow got his 61st wind, soldiered on, and delivered
himself a magisterial lifelong body of classic work. That same yardstick indicates that Amy Winehouse seems to suffer from the burden of her own prodigious talent, whereas Jack White manages to thrive despite it.
Indeed, Peter Green, the burned-out founder of Fleetwood Mac; Syd Barrett,
the freaked-out founder of Pink Floyd; and Brian Jones, the brain-toasted
founder of The Rolling Stones, all of whose bands went on to mega-fame and
ultra-wealth without them, would also have to be considered washouts
according to Sorells stringent criteria. A little harsh perhaps, given that one
must make certain allowances for at least some kinds of shared human frailty.
But Sorells take on what he called the psychological angle is also especially revealing when it comes to trying to fathom the sources and end results
of all the massively creative singer-songwriters in this book, not to mention
all the many truly talented artists who couldnt be in this book only because
of scale (but who will be featured in a future study). Sorell emphasizes some
of the true mystery surrounding great songs and their sometimes troubled
Afterword
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interpreters. Psychology, by its founders own admission, can do nothing

towards the elucidation of the nature of the artistic gift, nor can it explain
the way the artist works. Probably the least impressive of Freuds observations was that desire for fame, power, and the love of women lay behind the
creative will of the artist.2
Well, while those last motives certainly would seem to apply abundantly to
most rock and pop musicians, the origins of their gifts remain as hidden as
ever, most likely because what makes them gifts in the first place is the very
fact that they are hidden from the majority of people.
Luckily, Im not a psychologist, only a music lover like all the rest of
you, and my interest is mostly in marveling at the magnificent works of
artthe scintillating songsproduced from the depths of frequent misery
and isolation, yet sounding to us, against all reason, as though they were
written for us.
We felt them ourselves, these feelings in the best of the best songs, in our
own secret heart, but these particular singer-songwriters also spoke them
aloud for the world to hear. This is why I find the thoughts of Sir Francis
Galton in Hereditary Genius, to be so tantalizing and yet so disturbing at the
same time. He believed that no true genius can remain hidden and must
perforce assert himself, whether alone or in company.
As answered by Sorell in his excellent study of duality in the arts, this focus
provides even more evidence for the exceptional creative capacities and
emotional capabilities of the dark mirror kind of artist in general, and of these
unique singer-songwriters in particular:
Although it is difficult to prove the contrary, it is obvious that certain defects
in our mental make-up, inertia for one thing, dissipation for another, may
easily prevent talent from developing.
There is always more than a grain of truth in well-worn sayings, and one
of them is that character defeats genius. Moreover, the very same genes
which carry with them the blueprint of any creative potentiality, may also
carry failure and defeat. Galton thought that the compelling drive of creativeness, sometimes contrary to the conscious wishes of its possessor, may
give the creative activity the semblance of a special kind of addiction for
which there is no cure. Many geniuses are endowed with an almost seismographic sensibility, and their inventiveness has a touch of clairvoyance.3
Sounds to me like one of the most unintentionally perfect summaries of

Dylans harrowing Its All Right Ma, Im Only Bleeding that Ive ever
heard. And at this point, after engaging in so much reverie about singersongwriters, while also denying that I was ever psychoanalyzing them, Im
more than pleased to let a specialist such as Sorell make the following psychic
observation: Trying to deduce the reality of the man from the artists work
leads to disappointments because the creative genius often hides in the habit
of a man, unconsciously denying its shape.4
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Perhaps there should be a kind of periodic table for singer-songwriters, the

way there is one for the scientific elements and their interactive relationships.
Maybe there is one, and we just havent noticed what it looks like. Does the
table of their relative values and weights as elements amongst us resemble
the Grammy Awards? No, it couldnt. Otherwise Don Van Vliet would
have won a Grammy years ago for his wonderful portrayal of Captain Beefheart, before retiring to return to his first lovepainting.
Would the periodic table of singer-songwriters resemble Rolling Stone,
UNCUT, or Mojo magazines? Maybe on occasion, but the actual table, though
invisible, is much more self-evident and obvious than the relative interpretations of professional critics. And no, it couldnt just only be the cash register,
over which you and I have control as consumers, though it must be true that
the best singer-songwriters simply have to connect with the largest number of
people. Its part of their magic in the first place.
Perhaps history itself is the true location of the periodic table of elemental
singer-songwriters. And why not, since that at least places them in the same
context and perspective of the great earlier exponents of other forms of music.
This leads us to the question: which singer-songwriters will eventually be
ranked, if only by sheer creative survival, at an equally valued and parallel
position as those historically important examples of other musical greatness,
the classics? For instance, which singer-songwriter would last as long, and
serve as flexibly for successive generations, as Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms,
Gershwin, Armstrong, Parker, Davis, or Coltrane? The Beatles, The Rolling
Stones, The Who? Bob Dylan, certainly.
If two is company and three is a crowd, then what is a ritualistic but disconnected gathering of separate individuals who share a similar sensibility and
pathology and who carry on long distance conversations with each other,
and us, through bodies of literary and popular musical works? A community? A tribe? A style, perhaps. Lets consider for a moment singersongwriters as a community of strangers, a community of shadowsa select
group of strange sociopaths for whom one is company and twos a crowd.
Ironically, it is this same group of metaphysical malcontents who most
perfectly and beautifully mirror our own human condition back to us.
Cut off from the common clay by celebrity and just downright orneriness,
they nonetheless are such superior empaths that either alone or together, they
read our minds. And their dark mirror sings them back to us.
Im sure youll notice that its difficult to catch the image clearly when the
mirror is always spinning around, say, like Dylans does. Now Mr. Dylan, of
course, sees it spinning so fast that he conjures up a single unified image from
its ongoing blur. The rest of us see hundreds, if not thousands, of separate
images, sounds, and words. But as long as he stands in front of us, and in
front of the moving mirror, we remain confident that the message means
what we feel it means, and not necessarily even what we think it means.
This is the mystery of communication prior to comprehensionthe outsider
as prophet.
Afterword
195
Of course, an artist of the sophistication and rank of David Bowie could

never actually be mistaken for a real outsider, no matter how much he may
parlay his alien sensibility and futuristic sex appeal into a cabaret act.
But there are some for whom outsider status is more legitimate, the ones
whose theme song could be a certain great Kinks song, Im Not Like Everybody Else! These artists investigate the borderline where the unique
becomes the curse. These talented tunesmiths have a rare but real following
that amounts to a special cult status. Don Van Vliet, Van Dyke Parks, Bjork,
and others really are from somewhere else.
The musical miracle, however, only seems to occur when representatives of
the great outside manage to reach the mainstream loud and clear, and to
channel our feelings even more accurately than they can manage their own.
Ray Daviess gloriously sadistic song sums up his own passionate turmoil
over being gay in a world of macho male rock stars, a predicament that
placed him squarely within the same challenging matrix as many of the
female stars being studied as well, that of fitting in. Being considered on the
fringe, or performing in a style that feels utterly foreign to the mainstream
audience, can sometimes fog up the mirror. Or, even more strangely, it can
sometimes achieve a triumph of connection and serve as our own emotional
emblem, for reasons we may not even fully understand.
Once again, and still after all these years, Dylan is the titular mayor of the
town in which all these other singer-songwriters are citizens. He didnt take
over the place. They elected him. He doesnt even want to be mayor.
He doesnt see all the other singer-songwriters lined up behind him, as they
really are lined up behind him, as if waiting for the bus to poetry heaven.
He only sees the back of his own head in that special moving mirror, and he
is no closer to his real face than the rest of us are, standing behind him in line.
We get more guesses though.
He has no actual peers if we define a peer as someone who has had a
similarly seismic effect at revolutionizing musical tradition. To find such
parallels we would have to place him in the context of Elvis Presley or The
Beatles, if only because they alone loom as large. They are people after whom
their professional field was no longer the samepeople who will never leave
us because we carry them inside of us.
The sorrowful substance of their songs, by often turning its gaze inward,
sometimes reflects it outward. These artists have all turned up the emotional
volume on looking into the darkness and using the force of feeling as a
weapon against the night. Indeed, theirs was a golden age that, especially
from 19621992 was a grand spectacle to behold. And to behear.
So we end where we began, with the enigma of Bob Dylans amazing
words and music. And we must ask ourselves further questions when the
songs end, as end they must: what messages did we really want delivered
by these exemplars of empathythe great singer-songwriters? We need to
ask ourselves what our intimate relationship with the messages in these
powerful songs really means, but then strangely enough, Dylan actually
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Afterword
wrote a song to tell us that already, before we actually knew what we wanted,
and its the song we are listening to right now.
The song is called The Wicked Messenger, its from John Wesley Harding,
released 40 years ago, and it forgives the consequences as it outlines the
confrontation with the dark mirror which opens up his heart: If ye cannot
bring good news, then dont bring any.
Well, no one can sum things up better than Mr. Dylan. However, there is
one other observation made by a fine singer-songwriter who, though not
considered a dark mirror, nonetheless has provided ideal insight for appreciating the phenomenon itself. Steve Winwood, founder of the classic
progressive rock band Traffic, penned a remarkable ode to the persona,
expressed perfectly, during the end of that magic year of 1967, and written
from the perspective of the audience itself. In his marvelous song, Dear
Mr. Fantasy, addressed to all purveyors of songs who become a veritable
conduit for their audiences feelings, desires, appetites and even demands,
he appeals to Mr. Fantasy (a generic musical artist who could be literally
any of the tortured talents in this book) to play a tune, but one that will make
the whole audience happy and one that does anything required to take the
audience out of its shared collective gloom.
He (we) then suggests and cajoles the artist to sing a song and play guitar,
and to do it quickly, on demand so to speak. The crucial portion of this grand
testament song is his announcement that only Mr. Fantasy can make us all
laugh, but that by doing so he breaks out in tears. But the audience has a
reassuring pledge to make to Mr. Fantasy, and it is one that covers all the
powerfully creative personas we have just been appreciating: Please dont
be sad, if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldnt have known you all
these years.5
Most of us have experienced the internal battle between our desires for, on
the one hand, prurient personal content and, on the other, the poetic transformation of raw grey emotional metal into shiny songwriting gold. In other
words, we want to know what lies behind the masks that artists show us,
and beyond their public personas, in the soft-focus hinterland of their actual
personal lives, where, like us, they also have their share of turmoil, trials,
and tribulations.
This curious dichotomy between our desire to be entertained and to be told
only the good news, and our desire to celebrate our surrogates sufferings,
is a strange conflict indeed. On the one hand we have Mr. Difficulty, bringing
us down with reality sandwiches, and on the other hand we have Mr. Fantasy,
uplifting our taste buds in his search for some vague utopian ambrosia which
will explain life, or at least make it more meaningful, if only for a moment.
Things happen quickly in the overheated world of pop music. Its practitioners, like exotic purebred canines, seem to age at seven times our usual
Afterword
197
rate, and they often spin out of control right before our eyes while we all forget that we are no longer watching a theatrical performance but an actual private life being acted out in public.
As a postscript, and as of this writing in August 2008, both Amy Winehouse and Meg White seem to have entered a kind of tabloid hell reserved
for only the most unique specimens. They are both experiencing some of the
more profound difficulties of fame, celebrity, youthful indiscretion, and astronomical anxiety, but each for very different and very personality-specific reasons. Always enough sorrow to go around, after all.
I found that after immersing myself in the worlds of Amy Winehouse, and
The White Stripes in particular, it was sometimes necessary to take an aural
bath in the Moody Blues in order to find an antidote to the relentless sadness
and passive anger simmering in their extremely powerful music. And the
deeper the examination of the source of their travails, the more unsavory is
the realization that we are collectively feeding on their public pain.
The former child actor Gary Coleman once summed it up very well when
he opined, The world needs people like you and me whove been knocked
around by fate. Cause when people see us, they dont want to be us, and that
makes them feel great.6 Though certainly an ironic take on the service provided by public suffering, his sad observation also contains a kernel of what
we experience every time we read about either the frenzied actions of Amy
Winehouse or the quiet withdrawal of Meg White.
The mask of their celebrity has indeed eaten into their faces, the lovely faces
of talented young artists each with the misfortune of being temperamentally
unsuited to the vagaries of global acclaim. In the case of Meg White, superbly
strange drummer for the White Stripes, her arrival in tabloid hell was especially surprising to many, considering that the shy and reclusive star seldom
seemed to want to makes waves, cause trouble, or even answer simple questions from interviewers (leaving all those tasks to ex-husband and pretendbrother, Jack, who can more than handle them all by himself).
In the White Stripes song Passive Manipulation from 2005, and in one of
her rare vocal efforts, the drummer mysteriously intones a rather ominous
chanting lyric, Women, listen to your mothers, dont just succumb to the
wishes of your brothers, and she follows that with a warning not to mistake
your father for your loverwith the exact same lyric repeated three times in
three stanzas, just to make sure we get the overall message.
But sadly, it appears that she herself succumbed to someones wishes at
some early stage of her career, and the tape of their sexual encounter caused
her quite a shock back in September 2007. To be fair, her spokespeople declare
that it is not her in the tape, it is an imposter, and the tape is a cruel hoax. I
have to accept that statement at face value, having some sympathy for a musician who has long been on the receiving end of nasty critical attention over
the many fruitful years of her toiling in Jacks brilliant shadow.
Whatever the truth may be, its a cruel hoax, played either by a bizarre fan
or else the result of her own fateful mistake, one so dazzling in its disturbing
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Afterword
notoriety that it causes her fans to speculate on whether the dangling D

that she wears might relate to one of their best songs, The Denial Twist, a
song on the same album as Passive Manipulation, Get Behind Me Satan. If
you think that a kiss is all in the lips, you got it all wrong man!
From September 2007 to September 2008an eternity in the music business
Meg White dropped out of the spotlight, appearing only once in public at a
June concert by her partners new band, The Raconteurs. But she didnt
perform, only came out on stage after being introduced by White, idly tapped
on the drummers kit a couple of times, then fled back to wherever embarrassed rock stars hide out these days.
But the erstwhile Jack White has also declared that after his current Raconteurs tour is over, he definitely plans to get back with Meg and begin to
produce their long awaited seventh album. Whether his partner wants to get
back with him, and more importantly, to expose herself to the glare of flashbulbs illuminating her personal discomforts, that might be quite a different
matter. Maybe if we all agree to agree that its not her in the tape, she will
come back to construct the quirky rhythms some of us have grown rather
fond of over the last decade. Maybe Jack will be nicer to her this time.
Music lovers, myself included, truly hope so, and for the usual selfish reasons: we want, we need, more White Stripes music, and she is one of the only
two people who know how to create it. Shes Ringos second coming. Best
wishes for your speedy recovery from reality Meg; come back soon to take
us all to that other place.
In the case of the troubled Amy Winehouse, we have an even more severe
cautionary tale: a brilliant artist who is so out of it that her father has to
explain to her why there are so many people following her around and waiting outside for autographs. Because dear, youre the number one recording
artist in the world. . .I am?
Lets just say you know youre really in trouble when your wax effigy in
Madame Tussauds famous museum, installed in July 2008, looks better and
healthier that you do in real life. Wasnt it always supposed to be the other
way around? How can we laugh at those wax figures otherwise? Especially
once its real-life inspiration has contracted early emphysema, and was hospitalized overnight in late July for a reaction to some medication. How can
we laugh at all?
But this again raises the uncomfortable question: why do we so diligently
delve into the every move of apparently doomed performers, as if waiting
for the inevitable to happen? This is especially disturbing to me since Ive
attempted to write about the art and craft of such gifted people and yet find
it difficult, if not impossible, to avoid staring something very unpleasant right
in the face: the all too human hubris of the truly doomed. That and the fact
that we allow ourselves to be as entertained by the backstage drama as by
the songs themselves.
If Meg White is an innocent victim of circumstances, since whether it is her
in the tape or not, she is still somewhat innocent, then Amy Winehouse is a
Afterword
199
guilty participant in a terribly sad passion play of her own making. After all,
it is still ostensibly love which is at the root of all her problems. Love for the
wrong man, love for the wrong stimulants, love for the wrong reasons, and
most crucial of all, not nearly enough love for herself.
She has lost the chance to sing the James Bond theme song from the new
movie, coincidentally called Quantum of Solace, a title suitable for her next
album, if she ever makes it. But the third album has also been scuttled, or at
least permanently postponed, by her understandably alarmed record label.
Her producer has said he cant work with her, and every day there is another
soiled report of her chaotic nocturnal ramblings.
Her less than helpful husband will remain incarcerated for assault/
obstruction until December of the new year, by which time it remains to be
seen whether he returns ready, willing, and able to do what Amy inexplicably
wants to do: have five children. Talk about a desire for unconditional love,
somewhere in the dark of her soul Ms. Winehouse has decided that she and
her husband are ideal material for a Mom and Pops life. On what planet?
On planet dark mirror.
We have watched this scenario play out before, and sadly it is nothing new.
Think back to Judy Garlands late Carnegie Hall performances, or Marlene
Dietrich covered in black gauze and still croaking Lily Marlene, or Edith Piaf
turning into a living wound in Paris, or Marilyn Monroe misplacing herself in
her last role in the fatefully titled film, Somethings Got to Give, or Billie Holiday singing with Lester Young when she could hardly hold her head up, or
Elvis slowly melting in Vegas.
But at least they had somewhat longish careers and repeated achievements,
while in the case of Winehouse, an artist with considerably less emotional
intelligence than musical talent, we are witnessing a youthful implosion of
horrifying proportions. It is one, however, that raises unsettling questions
about our collective relationships with our dark mirrors, whoever they may be.
The answer to the question of why we are paying so much attention to her
living demise contains one of the most complex and ironic contradictions
which is inherently embedded in our celebrity-drenched pop culture. It
comes with an exotic pedigree: schadenfreude. The word is a root composite
of damage and joy and emphasizes the peculiar pleasure we sometimes
take at the misfortunes of others, apparently for the sole reason that it is they
and not we who are suffering so. Dying of a rage to live, for instance.
Even more telling, it is they who are in a commanding cultural position,
and yet they still cannot escape even the simplest of dilemmas to which we
are all prey. Strangely, this somehow gives us comfort, as does the lyrical content of so many of the dark mirrors to which we listen so intently that we
somehow magically manage to transform their songs into private insights
about our own personal lives.
Basically, anyone who has ever enjoyed a blues song (my baby done left me
all alone)which is just schadenfreude writ large in twelve bar formathas
been taking this secret joy to heart. Of course, blues songs change somewhat
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Afterword
when they suddenly become our song, about us, at which point someone else
is experiencing the exquisite distance required for schadenfreude to come
actively into play.
Shades of Dylans when I was down you just stood there grinning . . ..
Positively Bob, positively schadenfreude!
But how else to explain our transfixed state while hearing Dylan declare in
1966 that he is sitting so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to
pay to get out of going through all these things twice, when he was stuck
inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again. . .. Or when we hear him
warn us, 23 years later, that we live in a political world, In the cities of lonesome fear, where we revolve in our small circles and never quite know why.
We tend to let him wonder why for all of us. Thats his day job after all isnt it:
wonderment?
Just so, why were we so mesmerized that an angelic genius like Brian Wilson took to his bed for decades due to the pain of his self-defined defeats, or
so elated when we heard that he had been reincarnated by the Wondermints
and was performing Pet Sounds and Smile alive again? We didnt take pleasure in his pain but we did savor that special expression of our loneliness
and isolation when he lamented that he keeps looking for a place to fit where
I can speak my mind but that no matter how good intelligent people tell him
he is, it does him no good, since apparently he just wasnt made for these
times.
Perhaps for the same reasons, we misted over when Joni Mitchell
announced in Down To You that pleasure moves on too early and trouble
leaves too slow. . .. We simply knew it was also down to us.
And who can resist one of the strangest songs that The White Stripes ever
produced (only the second with her voice) when Meg prays to St. Andrew,
patron saint of performers, Dont forsake me, I travel backwards in ecstasy,
where are the angels?
So, when Amy declares that love is a losing game, we believe her, at least
the way she plays it, and we should all be somewhat careful, or at least hopeful, that our favorites of her songs dont ever actually become our song.
If John Lennon was right in his song from his first solo, post-Beatles record,
that God is a concept by which we measure our pain, doesnt that make all
of the singer-songwriters in this book missionaries of a new and unique religion? And the many others, too numerous to include but almost as talented
in the same relentless task, they seem to form a community of shadows,
showing us our own dark sides. By doing so, they are certainly telling us
the truth, but also sometimes intentionally telling us a lie, so they dont
entirely break our hearts. On both counts, it seems quite generous of them.
Notes
PROLOGUE
1. David Baker, Im Nobody, Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2007: 197.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (New York: De Capo Press, 1997), xiii.
5. Pierre Saint-Andre, The Individualism of the Poet-Musician, Thoughts.com,
January 1996: 4.
6. Gerald Marzorati, Hitsville UK, New York Times, February 16, 2003.
7. Robert Everett-Green, Wonder, Joy and Magic, Globe and Mail, January
27, 2007.
8. Ibid.
9. Stephen Sondheim in Danitia Smith, Music is Sweet, New York Times,
January 7, 2007, A3.
10. Ibid.
11. Robert Frost in Margo Jefferson, On Michael Jackson (New York: Vintage
Books, 2006), 28.
PART ONE INTRODUCTION

1. Ernest Becker, An Anti-Idealist Statement on Communication, Communication 1 (1974): 12127.
2. Ben Yagoda, Songs of Myself, New York Times, March 4, 2007.
3. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 121.
4. Ken Ludlow, Crazy Aint Creative, Screenwriter Magazine, Winter 2002: 21.
5. Mihaly Csikszentmihali, Flow (New York: Harper and Row, 1990), 71.
6. John Rockwell, Reverberations, New York Times, April 16, 2004.
7. Ibid.
8. Csikszentmihali, Flow, 109.
9. Greg Quill, Oh Canada, We Pen Great Songs, Toronto Star, April 14, 2007.
202
Notes
10. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
CHAPTER 1
1. Robbie Robertson in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 66.
2. BBC interview, The Bob Dylan Story, quoted from Larry David Smith,
Writing Dylan: Songs of a Lonesome Traveler (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 434.
3. Saint-Andre, The Individualism of the Poet Musician, 3.
4. Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Liner notes (New York: Columbia
Records, 1965).
5. Ian Penman interview, Love and Theft, UNCUT Magazine, October 2001:
24.
6. Phil Sutcliffe, The Road to God Knows Where, Mojo Magazine, January
2007: 78.
7. Ibid., 84.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Alan Sillitoe, Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (New York: Alfred Knopf,
1959), 21.
10. Robert Shelton, No Direction Home (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1986), 87.
11. Sutcliffe, The Road to God Knows Where, 79.
12. Ibid., 87.
13. Jon Langford in Sutcliffe, The Road to God Knows Where, 88.
14. Penman interview, Love and Theft, 29.
15. Robertson in The Immortals, 66.
16. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred
Knopf, 1954).
CHAPTER 2
1. Lindsey Buckingham in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 84.
2. Charles Granata, Wouldnt It Be Nice: Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach
Boys Pet Sounds (Chicago: A Capella Books, 2003), 13.
3. David Leaf, Good Vibrations Set, Liner notes (Los Angeles: Capitol Records,
1996), 6.
4. Tony Asher in Wouldnt It Be Nice, 8.
5. Ibid., 10.
6. Buckingham in The Immortals, 85.
7. Sylvie Simmons, Smile? Mojo Magazine, March 2004: 44.
8. James Cunningham, How Brian Wilson Found His Smile, Globe and Mail,
October 2, 2004.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
Notes
203
CHAPTER 3
1. Joni Mitchell, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joni
_mitchell.html.
2. Guy Dixon, That Music Gels Straight To MY Heart, Globe and Mail, January
29, 2007.
3. James Taylor in ibid.
4. Greg Quill, Oh Canada We Pen Great Songs, Toronto Star, January 28, 2007.
5. Joni Mitchell in Alexandra Gill, Joni Mitchell In Person, Globe and Mail,
February 17, 2007.
6. Joel Kroeker in Quill, Oh Canada We Pen Great Songs.
7. Ron Hynes in ibid.
8. Richard Ouzounian, Somethings Gained, Toronto Star, January 28, 2007.
9. Ibid.
10. Larry David Smith, The Torch Song Tradition (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2004), xiv.
11. Ibid., xv.
12. Richard Wilhelm in ibid.
13. Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, xv.
14. Ibid., xvii.
CHAPTER 4
1. Lou Reed in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 129.
2. Ben Rayner, David Bowie, Evergreen Fresh, Toronto Star, January 7, 2007.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Stephen Erlewine in James Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007).
6. James Perone, The Words and Music of David Bowie.
7. Reed in The Immortals.
8. Mojo Magazine, 60 Years of Bowie, A Special Tribute, 2007.
9. David Bowie in ibid., 20.
10. Martin Aston in ibid., 25.
11. Lindsay Kemp in ibid., 14.
CHAPTER 5
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
See http://thinkexist.com/quotes/leopold_von_sacher-masoch/.
Marianne Faithfull, Faithfull, (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1994), 210.
Ibid., 168.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 31.
204
Notes
10. Ibid., 35.

11. Ibid., 45.
12. Ibid., 69.
13. Ibid., 223.
14. The Mojo Collection, ed. Jim Irvin (Edinburgh, Scotland: Canongate Books,
2003), 433.
15. Faithfull, Faithfull, 276.
16. Ibid., 278.
17. Alexandra Gill, The Queen of Blonde, Globe and Mail, May 29, 2007.
18. Marianne Faithfull in ibid.
CHAPTER 6
1. Tom Waits, http://www.artquotes.net/.
2. The Mojo Collection, 382.
3. Barney Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun (New York: St. Martins Press,
1999), 284.
5. Tom Waits in Whats He Building In There?, Mojo Magazine, April 1999: 78.
CHAPTER 7
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Elvis Costello, http://thinkexist.com/quotation.

Smith, The Torch Song Tradition, 128.
Brian Hinton in ibid., 83.
Elvis Costello in ibid., 127.
Elvis Costello in ibid., 153.
Kit Rachlis in ibid., 171.
Janet Maslin in ibid., 184.
CHAPTER 8
1. Paul Elliott, Killing Me Softly, Mojo Magazine, January 2008: 51.
2. Ibid., 52.
3. Winehouse in ibid., 53.
4. Elliott, Killing Me Softly, 53.
5. Ibid., 56.
6. Alexander Pope, Epistle to a Lady 1740, in John OHaras A Rage to Live
(New York: Modern Library, 1949).
PART TWO INTRODUCTION

1. Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (London: Oxford University Press,
2000), 202.
Notes
205
2. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle De Courtivron, (eds.), Significant Others:

Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 11.
3. Vincent Todoli, Collaborations (London: Hansjorg Mayer, 2003).
4. Richard Hamilton in ibid.
CHAPTER 9
1. Elvis Costello in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 64.
2. David Stubbs, John Lennon Portrait: We All Shine On, UNCUT Magazine,
Spring 2004: 62.
3. Paul McCartney in Jon Wilde, Tomorrow Never Knows, UNCUT Magazine, Spring 2004: 66.
4. Jann Wenner, The Lennon Interview, Rolling Stone, January 7, 1970.
5. Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head (London: Pimlico Press, 1998), 11.
6. Stubbs, John Lennon Portrait, 41.
7. John Lennon, Skywriting by Word of Mouth (New York: Harper Paperbacks,
1987).
CHAPTER 10
1. Steve Van Zandt in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 70.
2. Leonard Cohen in Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (New York:
De Capo Press, 1997), xiii.
3. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xi.
4. Ibid., xii.
5. Keith Richards in Nick Johnstone, Portrait of The Tiredest, UNCUT Magazine, January 2004: 90.
6. Ibid., 64.
7. Ibid., 57.
8. Andrew Loog Oldham, 2Stoned (London: Vintage, 2003), 9.
9. Ibid., 29.
10. Ibid., 42.
11. Pete Townshend in ibid., 261.
12. Alan McGhee in ibid., 392.
13. Oldham, 2Stoned, 409.
CHAPTER 11
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Eddie Vedder in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 115.
Pat Gilbert, Look Back in Anguish, Mojo Magazine, February 2006: 71.
Pete Townshend in ibid.
Pete Townshend in Extreme Online Risks, Globe and Mail, May 7, 2007.
Speaking For A Generation, UNCUT Magazine, January 2003: 49.
Keith Rodway, Letters to the Editor, Mojo Magazine, February 2006.
Gilbert, Mojo Magazine, 71.
206
Notes
8. Roger Daltrey in Maximum Who, UNCUT Magazine, January 2007: 159.

9. Ben Ratliff, Who Knew, New York Times, May 24, 2004.
10. Sean OHagan, Death and Glory, The Observer, December 2003.
11. Larry David Smith, The Minstrels Dilemma (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 24.
13. Smith, The Minstrels Dilemma, 33.
14. Pete Townshend in ibid.
17. Ibid., 139.
19. Ibid., 169.
20. I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism, rev. ed. (Edison, New Jersey: Transaction
Press, 2004), 198.
21. Roger Daltrey in Smith, The Minstrels Dilemma, 208.
CHAPTER 12
1. Paul Simon in Stephen Holden, Class Reunion, Rolling Stone, March 1982.
2. James Taylor in The Immortals, Rolling Stone, April 15, 2004: 129.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xii.
6. Ibid.
7. Stephen Holden, Class Reunion, 62.
8. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, xii.
9. Holden, Class Reunion, 26.
10. Oliver Poole, Still Crazy After All These Years, National Post, November
2003: 11.
11. Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, 88.
12. Paul Simon in ibid., 95.
13. Paul Zollo and Paul Simon in ibid., 111.
14. Paul Simon in ibid., 117.
16. Ibid., 200.
17. Ibid., 207.
18. Ibid., 201.
CHAPTER 13
1. John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration, 202.
2. Ibid., 16.
3. Ibid., 23.
CHAPTER 14
1. Elton John, http://www.quotemonk.com.
Notes
207
2. Elton John in Bernie Taupin, The One Who Writes the Words for Elton John
(New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976), 5.
3. Taupin, The One Who Writes the Words, 7.
4. Tom Doyle, Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n Roll Interview!, Mojo Magazine, October 2006: 81.
5. Bernie Taupin and Elton John in Doyle, Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n
Roll Interview!, 84.
6. Doyle, Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n Roll Interview!, 84.
7. Long John Baldry in Doyle, Elton John: The Ultimate Rock n Roll Interview!, 85.
9. Elton John in ibid., 89.
13. Bernie Taupin in ibid., 88.
CHAPTER 15
1. Jack White, De Stijl, Liner notes (Olympia, WA: Sympathy For The Record
Industry, 2000).
2. The official White Stripes band contact/information Web site, http://www
.whitestripes.net/faq.php, September 26, 2006.
3. Jack White, Icky Thump, Liner notes (Detroit: Third Man Records, 2007).
4. Leonard Cohen, Im Your Man (New York: Columbia Records, 1988).
5. Robert Hilburn, Little White Truths Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2005.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
AFTERWORD
1. Walter Sorell, The Duality of Vision (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970): 370.
2. Ibid., 20.
3. Ibid., 22.
4. Ibid., 24.
5. Steve Winwood and Traffic, Dear Mr. Fantasy (New York: Warner-Tamerlane,
1967).
6. http://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/a/avenueqlyrics/
schadenfreudelyrics.html.
Index
Abbey Road (The Beatles), 174
A Beautiful Mind (movie), 113
A Childs Adventure (Faithfull), 68
acoustic technology, 13
Ade, George, 171
Aftermath (Rolling Stones), 131
Aladdin Sane (Bowie), 53, 56, 59, 60
Allman, Duane, 188
The All Music Guide (Perone), 54
America (Paul Simon), 153
American Beauty (Grateful Dead), 19192
The Angels Wanna Wear My Red
Shoes (Costello), 87
Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere (The
Who), 179
Archetypes, 125
Art: authenticity in, 6; great art, 18, 19;
Rilke on, 24
Artificial paradise, 99
Artistic marriages. See Creative pairs
Asher, Peter, 66
Asher, Tony, 34
As Tears Go By (Faithfull), 6263, 66,
67
As Tears Go By (Rolling Stones), 131
Aston, Martin, on David Bowie, 58
Authenticity in art, 6
Back to Black (Winehouse), 94, 99, 103
Back to Black (Winehouse), 104
Badu, Erykah, 100
Baez, Joan, on Bob Dylan, 22
Baker, David, xxi

Baldry, Long John, 166
Ballad of John and Yoko (Lennon), 2
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan (Faithfull),
65
Ball and Biscuit (The White Stripes),
187
The Band, 166
Barker, Hugh, 2, 6
Barrett, Syd, 192
The Basement Tapes (Dylan), 15, 22
Baudelaire, Charles, 91, 99, 100
The Beach Boys: about, xvi, 27, 28, 29;
history, 2930; In My Room, 32;
members, 33;
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow, 39. See also
Wilson, Brian
The Beatles (album), 118
The Beatles (group): Abbey Road, 174;
about, 18, 28, 122, 123, 12526, 128,
129, 131, 172, 174; I Want to Be Your
Man, 131; Lennon-McCartney partnership, 108, 112, 11526, 130, 190; Let
It Be, 174; Please Please Me, 120;
Revolver, 36, 180; Rubber Soul, 36, 118,
180, 187; self-expectations, 142; Sergeant Pepper, 36, 55; The White Album,
118, 136. See also Lennon, John; See
also McCartney, Paul
Beat writers, 75
Beautiful Maladies (Waits), 74
Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death, 1
210
Beggars Banquet (Rolling Stones), 131
Benson, Brendan190
Benstock, Shari, Intimate Warriors:
Portraits of a Modern Marriage, 110
Bernstein, Leonard, Brian Wilson and,
37
Berry, Chuck, 191
Between the Buttons (Rolling Stones), 131
The Big Three Killed My Baby (The
White Stripes), 183
Big Yellow Taxi (Mitchell), 42
Bjork, 101
The Black Rider (Burroughs), 69, 79
Blame It on Cain (Costello), 86
Blonde on Blonde (Dylan), 14, 19, 21, 24
Bloomfield, Mike, 12
Blue (Mitchell), 4546, 48, 49
Blue Millionaire (Faithfull), 68
Blue Moves (Elton John), 169
Blues, 101, 190, 191, 192, 199200
Blues-breaker music, 179
Bluesbreakers, 178
Blur, 123
Bookends (Simon and Garfunkel), 152,
153, 154
Both Sides Now (Mitchell), 42
Bowie, Angie, 57
Bowie, David, 5160; about, xvi, 2, 95,
195; acoustic technology and, 13;
Aladdin Sane, 53, 56, 59, 60; art decade
of, 59; artistic change, 53; cocaine
addiction, 58; David Bowie, 51;
Diamond Dogs, 53, 57, 59; evolution
of, 59; expectations of, 142; Heroes, 59;
Hunky Dory, 53, 56, 57, 58, 59; The
Lodger, 59; Low, 59; The Low Trilogy, 59;
The Man Who Sold the World, 53, 57,
59; masks, 53, 54, 5556, 57, 59; mime
and, 59; pantomime rock, 57; The
Prettiest Star, 57; producers, 59; The
Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the
Spiders from Mars, 52, 54, 59; Space
Oddity, 53, 59; Station to Station, 59;
Time, 60; Young Americans, 56, 59
The Boxer (Simon and Garfunkel),
149, 153
Brackett, Donald, 157
Brennan, Kathleen, 78, 79
Breton, Andre, 108
Index
Bridge Over Troubled Waters (Simon and
Garfunkel), 152, 153
Bringing It All Back Home (Dylan), 14, 17
Brodsky Quartet, 90
Broken Boy Soldiers (The Raconteurs),
189
Broken English (Faithfull), 62, 64, 65, 69
Buckingham, Lindsey: about, 84, 95,
157, 158; on Brian Wilson, 27, 36;
Buckingham Nicks, 157, 158, 159;
Crystal, 160; Long Distance
Winner, 15960; partnership with
Stevie Nicks, 112, 143, 15561; Races
Are Won, 160; similarity to Meg
White, 176; Tusk, 176; See also
Fleetwood Mac
Buckingham Nicks (album), 157, 158, 159
Buckley, David, on David Bowie, 54
Bukowski, Charles, 75
Bunche, Ralph, 58
Burrough, William, 69
Bush, Kate, 100
The Byrds, 45, 191
Cabinessence (Wilson), 38
Cactus Tree (Mitchell), 48
Cage, John, 61
California Girls (Wilson), 33
Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power, 115
The Captain and The Kid (Elton John),
165, 168
Captain Beefheart, 75, 76, 175, 194
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt
Cowboy (John and Taupin), 165
Cash, Johnny: It Aint Me Babe, 19;
Man in Black, 2
Catch a Wave (Wilson), 32
Celebrity: Bob Dylan on, 28; Brian
Wilson on, 28, 29, 30; John Lennon
on, 29; John Updike on, 116; Joni
Mitchell on, 49
Central Park (group), 150
Chadwick, Whitney, 110, 156
Chaplin, Charles, 101
Cheap Reward (Costello), 8687
Cherry (Winehouse), 97
City Slickers, 179
The Clash, 84
Closing Time (Waits), 76
Index
Clouds (Mitchell), 42
Clouds (Mitchell), 45
Cobain, Kurt, 101, 105
Cocteau, Jean, 55
Cohen, Herb, 76
Cohen, Leonard: about, xx, 102, 181; on
good songs, 130
Cold Hard Cash, 177
Cole, Nat King, Nature Boy, 32
Coleman, Gary 197
Collaboration. See Creative pairs
Collective unconscious, 125
Comparative morphology, 58, 59
The Confidence Man (Melville), 2021
Consolers of The Lonely (The Raconteurs),
189
Copeland, Aaron, 122
Corso, Gregory, 75
Costello, Elvis, 8190; about, xvi, 2, 95,
142; The Angels Wanna Wear My
Red Shoes, 87; anger of, 81, 82, 90;
on The Beatles, 115, 117; bitterness,
89; Blame It on Cain, 86; on
careerism, 89; Cheap Reward, 86
87; Deep Dark Truthful Mirror, 88;
Imagination (Is a Powerful
Deceiver), 86; Im Not Angry, 87;
The Juliet Letters, 90; Less Than
Zero, 87; masks, 85; My Aim Is True,
84, 85, 87, 89; Mystery Dance, 86,
87; narrative impressionism, 89;
No Dancing, 86; persona, 82, 83;
Punch the Clock, 88; Rumours, 84;
sexual relations, 87; Spike, 87;
summer of hate, 84; Waiting for
the End of the World, 87; Welcome
to the Working Week, 85; on writing
about music, ix
Court and Spark (Mitchell), 48
Crazy Aint Creative (Ludlow), 3
Cream, 191
Creative change, 29, 48, 49, 53, 142
Creative Collaboration (John-Steiner), 109,
15657
Creative flow, 4, 117, 168
Creative pairs, 10713, 15657
Crosby, David, on Joni Mitchell, 45, 46,
48
Crosby Stills & Nash, 45
211
Crowds and Power (Canetti), 115
Crystal (Buckingham and Nicks), 160
CSI: Miami, opening theme, 140
CSI: NY, opening theme, 140
Csikszentmihali, Mihaly, flow, 4
Cunningham, James, on Brian Wilson,
37, 38
Dalton, David, Faithfull, 63, 6970
Daltrey, Roger: about, xvi, 135, 139, 145
46; partnership with Pete
Townshend, 109, 112, 13546; See also
The Who
Dance music, 78
Dangerous Acquaintances (Faithfull), 68
The Dap-Kings, 99
Dark mirrors, 76, 85, 102, 181, 189, 194
Dark Rider (Waits), 90
David Bowie (Bowie), 51
Davies, Ray, Im Not Like Everybody
Else, 195
Dear Mr. Fantasy (Winwood), 196
Death Letter (The White Stripes), 179
De Courtivron, Isabelle, 110, 156
Deep Dark Truthful Mirror
(Costello), 88
The Denial of Death (Becker), 1
Desire (Dylan and Levy), 148
De Stijl (art style), 176
De Stijl (The White Stripes), 172, 177,
185
Destiny Rules (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Dialogue with oneself, 16
Diamond Dogs (Bowie), 53, 56, 59
Dickinson, Jim, 30
Diva with Demons (article), 91
Dixon, Guy, on Joni Mitchell, 42
Don Juans Reckless Daughter (Mitchell),
49
Donne, John, 1
Dont Talk, Put Your Head on My
Shoulder (Wilson), 35
The Doors, 101
Down To You (Mitchell), 200
Doyle, Tom, on Elton John, 165, 166, 168
Do You Wanna Dance? (Wilson), 32
Drake, Nick, 101
Dregs, 128
The Duality of Vision (Sorrell), 19293
212
Dunbar, John, 6566
Dwight, Reginald. See John, Elton
Dylan, Bob, 1125; about, xiixiv, xix,
xvi, xx, 2, 28, 30, 43, 83, 130, 141, 192,
194, 19596, 200; as accidental angel,
16; anger of, 19, 83; appearance, 14;
The Basement Tapes, 15, 22; on being
Bob Dylan, 17; on being celebrity, 28;
biography, 16; Blonde on Blonde, 14,
19, 21, 24; Bringing It All Back Home,
14, 16; collaboration, 148; Desire, 148;
dialogue with oneself, 16;
expectations of, 141; Faithfull and, 68;
flow state, 4; on happiness, 22;
Highway 61 Revisited, 14, 18, 19; Its
All Over Now Baby Blue, 18; Its
All Right Ma, Im Only Bleeding,
193; John Wesley Harding, 14, 2223,
196; on Joni Mitchell, 48; Like a
Rolling Stone, 18, 130; loneliness, 20;
Love and Theft, 20; love songs, 21, 24;
media and, 14; Modern Times, 12, 20,
23; My Back Pages, 6; performance
style, 17; persona, 57; as prophet, 24;
Queen Jane Approximately, 9; on
recording, 13; Sad-Eyed Lady of the
Lowlands, 21, 24; Seeger and, 1213;
as story teller, 28; Tarantula, 15;
Things Have Changed, 11; Time
Out of Mind, 20; The Times They Are
a Changing, 11; Visions of
Johanna, 21, 24; voice, 27, 117; The
Wicked Messenger, 196; Woody
Guthrie and, 15
The Eagles, 192
Elephant (The White Stripes), 177, 186,
187
Eliot, T.S., 18, 19
Ellington, Paul, 132
Elliott, Paul, on Amy Winehouse, 93,
94, 96
Elson, Karen, 184
Emotional Weather Report (Waits),
77
Empty Sky (John and Taupin), 166
Enantiomorphism, 189
Endless Wire (The Who), 137, 144
Eno, Brian, 59, 147
Index
Epic poetry, x, 14
Epistle to a Lady, Of the Characters of
Women (Pope), 106
Epstein, Brian, 120, 128
Erlewine, Stephen, on David Bowie, 54
Ethical Spectacle (Wallace), 16
Everett-Green, Robert, xix, xx
Ever Present Past (McCartney), 126
Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones), 131
Fabs, 128
Faithfull (Dalton), 63, 6970
Faithfull, Major Glynn, 62
Faithfull, Marianne, 6171; about, xvi,
68, 69; A Childs Adventure, 68; As
Tears Go By, 6263, 66, 67; The
Ballad of Lucy Jordan, 65; Blue
Millionaire, 68; on Bob Dylan, 68;
breast cancer, 70; Broken English, 62,
64, 65, 69; Dangerous Acquaintances,
68; expectations of, 142; Falling
From Grace, 68; family history, 62;
Guilt, 65; heroin addiction, 64, 66,
69, 70; Lennon and, 65; on
performing, 67; performing style, 67;
Rolling Stones and, 63; sadness, 61;
The Seven Deadly Sins, 69; Sister
Morphine, 62, 6364; Sticky Fingers,
62, 63; Truth Bitter Truth, 68; voice,
64; Why Dya Do It?, 65; Working
Class Hero, 62, 65
Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in
Popular Music (Barker and Taylor),
2, 67
Falling From Grace (Faithfull), 68
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 75
Flack, Roberta, 91
Fleetwood, Mick, 129, 157, 158, 161
Fleetwood Mac (album), 155
Fleetwood Mac (group): about, 84, 95,
111, 129, 155, 192; Buckingham-Nicks
partnership, 15561; cocaine, 16768;
Destiny Rules, 160; Fleetwood Mac,
155; Goodbye Baby, 160; Green,
Peter, 159, 175, 192; Illume, 160;
Oh Well, 175; Rumours, 84, 155;
Say Goodbye, 160; Say You Will,
160; Say You Will, 160; Silver
Girl, 160; Then Play On, 175; Throw
Index
Down, 160; Whats The World
Coming To?, 160. See also Buckingham, Lindsey; See also Nicks, Stevie
Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos
(Brackett), 157
Flow state, 4, 107, 168
Flying Burrito Brothers, 191
Folk songs, Dylan on, 18
For the Roses, 48
409 (Wilson), 32
Frank (Winehouse), 93, 94, 95, 9698
Franks Wild Years (Waits), 79
Friends (John and Taupin), 167
Fritz, 157, 158
Frost, Robert, Mending Wall, xxi
Frozen Love (Buckingham and
Nicks), 159, 160
Fuck Me Pumps (Winehouse), 97
Fun Fun Fun (Wilson), 32
Gallagher, Liam, 117
Galton, Sir Francis, 193
Garfunkel, Art: about, xvi, 147;
biography, 15152; Bookends, 152, 153,
154; The Boxer, 149, 153; Bridge
Over Troubled Waters, 152, 153; Parsley
Sage Rosemary and Thyme, 152;
partnership with Paul Simon, 109,
111, 112, 143, 14754; Sounds of Silence,
152; voice, 149; Wednesday Morning, 3
AM, 152
Garland, Judy, 91, 199
Get Behind Me Satan (The White Stripes),
186
Gill, Alexandra, on Marianne Faithfull,
70, 71
Gillis, John. See White, Jack
Ginsberg, Allen, 73, 75
Girl (Lennon), 118
Glimmer Twins, 62, 131
The Go, 176
God (Lennon), 200
Godard, Jean Luc, 7
God Only Knows (Wilson), 35
Goodbye Baby (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (John and
Taupin), 165, 166
Good Vibrations (Wilson), 33
Graceland (Paul Simon), 152
213
Granata, Charles, Wouldnt It Be Nice, 31
Grateful Dead, 19192
Great art, T.S. Eliot on, 18, 19
Great artist, Lewis on, 18
Green, Peter, 159, 175, 192
Guilt (Faithfull), 65
Guthrie, Woody, Dylan and, 15
Hamilton, Richard, 111
Hammond, John, 15
Hang On To Your Ego (Wilson), 35
Harrison, George, 119
Hartley, Liz, 57
Harvey, P.J., 101
Heart Attack and Vine (Waits), 78
Heart of Saturday Night (Waits), 76
Hearts and Bones (Paul Simon), 152
He Can Only Hold Her (Winehouse),
105
Hejira (Mitchell), 49
Hell, Richard, xx
Hello Operator (The White Stripes),
185
Help! (Lennon), 31
Help Me (Mitchell), 48
Hereditary Genius (Galton), 193
Here Tis (The Who), 179
Heroes (Bowie), 59
Highway 61 Revisited (Dylan), 14, 18, 19
Hilburn, Robert, on The White Stripes,
187, 188
Hinton, Brian, on Elvis Costello, 88
Hislop, Ian, 74
The Hissing of Summer Lawns (Mitchell),
49
Holden, Steve, 85, 149, 150
Holiday, Billie, 91, 199
Honky Chateau (John and Taupin), 165
Hornby, Nick, Songbook, xix, xx
Hoskyns, Barney, Waiting for the Sun,
77
House, Son, 179
Humor, in music, 179
Hunky Dory (Bowie), 53, 56, 57, 58, 59
Hunter, Robert, xx
Hynes, Ron, on Joni Mitchell, 43
Ian, Janis, 94
I Cant Explain (Townshend), 141
214
Icky Thump (The White Stripes), 173,
175, 178, 188
I Dont Want to Face It (Lennon), 121
I Fought Pirhanas (The White
Stripes), 18384
I Get Around (Wilson), 32
I Hope That I Dont Fall in Love with
You (Waits), 7677
I Just Wasnt Made for These Times
(Wilson), 36
I Know Theres An Answer (Wilson),
35
Illume (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Imagination (Is a Powerful Deceiver)
(Costello), 86
Im Losing You (Lennon), 121
Im Not Angry (Costello), 87
Im Not Like Everybody Else (Kinks),
195
Indica Gallery, 66
In His Own Write (Lennon), 121
In My Bed (Winehouse), 98
In My Room (Beach Boys), 32
Intimate Warriors: Portraits of a Modern
Marriage (Benstock), 110
Irina Palm (film), 70
It Aint Me Babe (Cash), 19
Its All Over Now Baby Blue (Dylan),
18
Its All Right Ma, Im Only Bleeding
(Dylan), 193
I Want to Be Your Man (The Beatles),
131
Jackson, Michael: about, 78; acoustic
technology and, 13; rights to Beatles
songs, 126
Jagger, Mick: about, xvi, 69, 128, 13132;
As Tears Go By, 66; partnership
with Keith Richards, 109, 112, 12734,
143. See also The Rolling Stones
Jakeman, Andrew. See Riviera, Jake
Jardine, Al, 33, 39
Jazz, 192
John, Elton: about, xvi, xviii, 9, 95, 163
64, 166; Blue Moves, 169; The Captain
and The Kid, 165, 168; Captain Fantastic
and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, 165; Empty
Sky, 166; Friends, 167; Goodbye Yellow
Index
Brick Road, 165, 166; Honky Chateau,
165; Madman across the Water, 165,
167; partnership with Bernie Taupin,
143, 16369; Tumbleweed Connection,
165; Your Song, 165
The John Lennon Anthology box set, 125
Johnson, Robert, 183
John-Steiner, Vera, 109, 155, 15657
John Wesley Harding (Dylan), 14, 2223,
196
Jones, Brian, 129, 192
Jones, David. See Bowie, David
Jones, Norah, 100
Jones, Rickie Lee, 78
Jones, Spike, 179
Joni Mitchell (Mitchell), 45
The Juliet Letters (Costello), 90
Jung, Carl, 125
Just Friends (Winehouse), 104
Kemp, Lindsay, 59
Kiefer, Anselm, 39
Killing Me Softly (article), 91
Krall, Diana, 81, 100
Kroeker, Joel, on Joni Mitchell, 43
Ladies of the Canyon (Mitchell), 45
Lambert, Kit, 137
Langford, John, on Bob Dylan, 23
Lavigne, Avril, 66
Leaf, David, on The Beach Boys, 3334
Led Zeppelin, 191
Leland, John, xx
Lennon, John: about, xvi, 75, 95, 11516,
123, 139, 192; Ballad of John and
Yoko, 2; The Beatles, 118; on celebrity,
29; disillusionment, 122, 123;
Faithfull and, 65; Girl, 118; God,
200; Help!, 31; I Dont Want to
Face It, 121; Im Losing You, 121;
In His Own Write, 121; on life, 126;
musical style, 124; Nowhere Man,
31, 121; partnership with Paul
McCartney, 108, 112, 11526, 130, 190;
pathology, 117; Plastic Ono Band, 65;
relationship with Yoko Ono, 108, 116,
118, 119, 120, 121, 125; Rubber Soul, 36,
118, 180, 187; self-revelation, 11718;
The Sixties, 122; Skywriting by Word of
Index
Mouth, 118, 121; solipsism, 105; A
Spaniard in the Works, 121; Strawberry Fields Forever, 116; voice, 117,
118; The White Album, 118, 136; See
also The Beatles
Less Than Zero (Costello), 87
Let It Be (The Beatles), 174
Let it Be. . .Naked (McCartney), 12425
Let It Bleed (Rolling Stones), 131
Lewis, Wyndham, 18
Lifehouse (Townshend), 136
Like a Rolling Stone (Dylan), 18, 130
Little Cream Soda (Fleetwood Mac),
175
Little Deuce Coupe (Wilson), 32
Little Surfer Girl (Wilson), 32
Live at Leeds (Townshend), 136
The Lodger (Bowie), 59
Long Distance Winner (Buckingham
and Nicks), 15960
Love, Mike, 33, 35, 38, 39
Love Is a Losing Game (Winehouse),
104
Love and Theft (Dylan), 20
Love songs, Bob Dylan, 21, 24
Low (Bowie), 59
The Low Trilogy (Bowie), 59
Ludlow, Ken, Crazy Aint Creative, 3
Lunacy, 3
Lydon, John, 117
Lyric poetry, x, 14
MacDonald, Ian, 117, 119, 122, 123
Madman across the Water (John and
Taupin), 165, 167
Madonna: about, 63, 78, 101; acoustic
technology and, 13
Man in Black (Johnny Cash), 2
The Man Who Sold the World (Bowie), 53,
57, 59
Martin, George: about, 120; Beatles, 118;
on Brian Wilson, 27
Marzorati, Gerald, xix
Maslin, Janet, 90
Masochism, origin of term, 62
Material Girl, 63
Mayall, John, 178
McCartney, Paul: about, xvi, 66, 95, 123,
125, 139; biography, 116; Ever Present
215
Past, 126; Let it Be. . .Naked, 12425;
musical style, 124; partnership with
John Lennon, 108, 112, 11526, 130,
190; pathology of, 116; Penny Lane,
116; poetic license, xx; relationship
with Yoko Ono, 120; voice, 117;
Yesterday, 130; See also The Beatles
McGee, Alan, 133
McLaughlin, Sarah, 100
McManus, Declan. See Costello, Elvis
McVie, Christine, 159, 160, 161
McVie, John, 161
Me and Mr. Jones (Winehouse),
10304
Melville, Herman, The Confidence Man,
2021
Mencius, 171
Mending Wall (Frost), xxi
Miles, Barry, 66
Miller, Steve, 90
Milosz, Czeslaw, 80
Mingus, Charles, 49
The Minstrels Dilemma (Smith),
144
Mitchell, Chuck, 44
Mitchell, Joni, 4150; about, xvi, xx,
2, 56, 101; Big Yellow Taxi, 42;
biography, 44; Blue, 4546, 48, 49;
Both Sides Now, 42; Cactus Tree,
48; career, 4344, 45; on celebrity, 49;
Clouds, 42; Clouds, 45;
confessional songs, 48, 49, 57;
Court and Spark, 48; creative growth,
48, 49; Don Juans Reckless Daughter,
49; Down to You, 200; expectations
of, 142; For the Roses, 48; Hejira, 49;
Help Me, 48; The Hissing of Summer
Lawns, 49; Joni Mitchell, 45; Ladies of
the Canyon, 45; on love, 47; producers,
45; Shine, 50; Songs for a Seagull, 45;
Taming the Tiger, 44; as torch bearer,
44, 46, 49; as troubadour, 47; Wild
Things Run Fast, 49; Woodstock, 42
Modern Times (Dylan), 12, 20, 23
Monroe, Marilyn, 199
Moon, Keith, 140
Morrisette, Alanis, 100
Morrison, Jim, 101
Morrison, Van, 86
216
Mrs. Robinson (Simon and
Garfunkel), 112
Muddy Waters, 132
Music: cultural history, xxi; humor in,
179
Music From Big Pink (The Band), 166
The Music Is Sweet, The Words Are
True (Dinitia Smith), xx
My Aim Is True (Costello), 84, 85, 87
My Back Pages (Dylan), 6
My Generation (Townshend), 141
Mystery Dance (Costello), 86, 87
My Tears Dry on Their Own
(Winehouse), 104
Narrative impressionism, 89
Nash, Graham, 48
Nash, John, 113
Nature Boy (Cole), 32
Newman, Randy, 179
Nicks, Stevie: about, 157, 158;
Buckingham Nicks, 157, 158, 159;
Crystal, 160; Frozen Love, 159,
160; Long Distance Winner, 159
60; partnership with Lindsey
Buckingham, 112, 143, 15561; Races
Are Won, 160; See also Fleetwood
Mac
Nico, 61, 105
Nighthawks at the Diner (Waits), 76, 77
Nilsson, Harry, 179
No Dancing (Costello), 86
Non-prevalent dynamics, 113
Nowhere Man (Lennon), 31, 121
Nyro, Laura, 96
Oasis, 123
Oates, Joyce Carol, 106
OConnor, Sinead, 101
OHagan, Sean, on The Who, 13940
Oh Well (Fleetwood Mac), 175
Oldham, Andrew Loog, 66, 128, 131,
132, 133
One-Trick Pony (Paul Simon), 152
The One Who Writes The Words For Elton
John (Taupin), 163
The Only Living Boy In New York
(Paul Simon), 153
Ono, Yoko: about, 101, 126; The John
Index
Lennon Anthology box set, 125;
partnership with John Lennon, 108,
116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125;
relationship with Paul McCartney,
120
OReilly, Baba, 140
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
(Waits), 80
Ouzounian, Richard, on Joni Mitchell,
43
Page, Jimmy, 188
pantomime rock, 57
Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow (Beach Boys),
39
Parks, Van Dyke, 34, 35
Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme (Simon
and Garfunkel), 152
Passive Manipulation (The White
Stripes), 197
Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 12
Paul Simon (Paul Simon), 152
Penny Lane (McCartney), 116
Perone, James, on David Bowie, 54
Pet Sounds (Wilson), 29, 31, 33, 34, 36
Piaf, Edith, 91, 199
Pink Floyd, 192
Plastic Ono Band (Lennon), 65
Please Let Me Wonder (Wilson), 33
Please Please Me (The Beatles), 120
Pleshette, Suzanne, 106
Poems, cultural history, x
Poetry, in Dylans work, 14
Poole, Oliver, 150
Pope, Alexander, 106
Pop music, 112, 120
Porter, Cole, xviii
Power, Cat, 100
Presley, Elvis, 84, 191
The Prettiest Star (Bowie), 57
Prophecy, 24
Punch the Clock (Costello), 88
Punk-blues, 176
Punk music, 63, 74, 84
Quadrophenia (Townshend), 136
Quantum of Solace (movie), 199
Queen Jane Approximately (Dylan), 9
Quill, Greg, 6; on Joni Mitchell, 42
Index
Races Are Won (Buckingham and
Nicks), 160
Rachlis, Kit, 89
The Raconteurs, 189, 190, 198
Rank, Otto, ix
Ratliff, Ben, on The Who, 139
Rayner, Ben, on David Bowie, 52,
53, 54
Recording music, Brian Wilson
and, 30
Reed, Lou: about, xx, 102, 181; on David
Bowie, 51, 56
Rehab (Winehouse), 94, 96, 99, 103
Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Record
and the Sixties (MacDonald), 119, 122,
123
Revolver (The Beatles), 36, 180
The Rhythm of The Saints (Paul Simon),
152
Richards, I.A., on Townshend, 145
Richards, Keith: about, xvi, 70, 95, 99,
128, 129, 13132; partnership with
Mick Jagger, 109, 112, 12734, 143;
Satisfaction, 130, 132. See also The
Rolling Stones
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and
the Spiders from Mars (Bowie), 52,
54, 59
Riviera, Jake, 82, 83
Robertson, Robbie, on Bob Dylan, 11,
12, 24
Rock music, 52, 5556, 82, 191
Rock n roll, 52, 82, 191
Rockwell, John, on Bob Dylan, 5
Rodway, Keith, on The Who, 138
The Rolling Stones: about, 62, 111, 127
28, 129, 132, 179, 192; Aftermath, 131;
As Tears Go By, 131; Beggars
Banquet, 131; Between the Buttons, 131;
Exile on Main Street, 131; expectations
of, 142; Jagger-Richards partnership,
109, 112, 12734, 143; Let It Bleed, 131;
Sister Morphine, 62; Sticky Fingers,
62, 131; Their Satanic Majesties
Request, 131. See also Jagger, Mick; See
also Richards, Keith
Rollins, Henry, xx
Roth, David Lee, 91, 99
Roth, Dieter, 111
217
Rubber Soul (The Beatles), 36, 118, 180,
187
Rumours (Fleetwood Mac), 84, 155
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
(Dylan), 21, 24
Saint-Andre, Pierre, 16
Satisfaction (Richards), 130, 132
Saving All My Love for You (Waits),
78
Say Goodbye (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Say You Will (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Say You Will (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Schadenfreude, 199
Seeger, Pete, 1213, 149
Self-examination, 34
Sergeant Pepper (The Beatles), 36, 55
The Seven Deadly Sins (Faithfull), 69
Seven Nation Army (The White
Stripes), 177, 18687
The Sex Pistols, 84
Shakur, Tupac, xx
Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 99
She Knows Me Too Well (Wilson),
33
Shelton, Robert, 22
Shine (Mitchell), 50
Shutdown (Wilson), 32
Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate
Partnership (Chadwick and De
Courtivron), 110, 156
Sillitoe, Alan, 20
Silver Girl (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Simmons, Sylvie, on Brian Wilson,
3637
Simon, Paul: about, xvi, 95, 147;
America, 153; biography, 15152;
Bookends, 152, 153, 154; The Boxer,
149, 153; Bridge Over Troubled Waters,
152, 153; Dylan as influence, 152;
Graceland, 152; Hearts and Bones, 152;
One-Trick Pony, 152; The Only Living Boy In New York, 153; Parsley
Sage Rosemary and Thyme, 152; partnership with Art Garfunkel, 109, 111,
112, 143, 14754; Paul Simon, 152; The
Rhythm of The Saints, 152; The
Sounds of Silence, 152; Sounds of
Silence, 152; Still Crazy After All These
218
Years, 152; Surprise, 147; There Goes
Rhymin Simon, 152; Wednesday
Morning, 3 AM, 152
Sincerity and Authenticity (Trilling), 3
Singer-songwriters, xxii; coal mine
metaphor, xiixiv; creative change,
29, 48, 49, 53, 142; dark mirror, 76;
long and waning careers, 199; messianic role, xix; oil well metaphor, xiv;
in partnerships, 10713, 192; risk and,
62; schadenfreude, 199; solipsism, 105,
138, 167; as solo artists, 19, 107, 143,
144; swimming pools metaphor,
xvxvi
Sister Morphine (Faithfull), 62,
6364
Skywriting by Word of Mouth (Lennon),
118, 121
Small Change (Waits), 76
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Cobain),
101
Smile (Wilson), 28, 29, 35, 36, 136
Smith, Dinitia, xx
Smith, Larry David: on Bob Dylan, 13,
20, 83; on Elvis Costello, 83, 88, 89; on
Joni Mitchell, 43, 46, 47; on Pete
Townshend, 142, 14445
Smith, Patti, xx, 101
Solipsism, 105, 138, 167
Some Unholy War (Winehouse),
104
Sondheim, Stephen, xxxxi
Songbook (Hornby), xix
Songs for a Seagull (Mitchell), 45
Songwriters on Songwriting (Zollo), 130
Sorrell, Walter, 19293
The Sounds of Silence (Paul Simon),
152
Sounds of Silence (Simon and Garfunkel),
152
Space Oddity (Bowie), 53, 59
A Spaniard in the Works (Lennon), 121
Spector, Phil, 29
Spike (Costello), 88
Springsteen, Bruce, on Bob Dylans
music, 18
St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the Air)
(The White Stripes), 188, 200
Station to Station (Bowie), 59
Index
Stevens, Wallace, 25
Sticky Fingers (Rolling Stones), 131;
Marianne Faithfull, 62
Still Crazy After All These Years (Paul
Simon), 152
Stills, Steven, partnership with Neil
Young, 109
Stone, Joss, 100
The Stones. See The Rolling Stones
Stop Breaking Down (Robert
Johnson), 183
Strawberry Fields Forever (Lennon),
116
Stronger Than Me (Winehouse), 97
Stubbs, David, 117, 124
Sugar Never Tasted So Good (The
White Stripes), 184
Surfin (Wilson), 32
Surfin USA (Wilson), 32
Surfs Up (Wilson), 9, 38, 39
Surprise (Paul Simon), 147
Sutcliffe, Phil, on Bob Dylan, 18, 19,
22, 23
The Swimmer (movie), xv
Swordfishtrombones (Waits), 78, 79
Synchronicity, 125
Take the Box (Winehouse), 98
Taming the Tiger (Mitchell), 44
Tarantula (Dylan), 15
Taupin, Bernie: about, xvi, xviii, 95,
16364, 167; Captain Fantastic and the
Brown Dirt Cowboy, 165; Empty Sky,
166; Friends, 167; Goodbye Yellow
Brick Road, 165, 166; Honky Chateau,
165; Madman Across the Water, 165,
167; The One Who Writes The Words
For Elton John, 163; relationship
with Elton John, 143, 16369; Tumbleweed Connection, 165; Your Song,
165
Taylor, James: about, 2; on Joni Mitchell,
42; on Simon and Garfunkel,
14849
Taylor, Yuval, 2, 6
Their Hearts Were Full of Spring
(Wilson), 32
Their Satanic Majesties Request (Rolling
Stones), 131
Index
Then Play On (Fleetwood Mac), 175
Theory of nonprevalent dynamics,
113
There Goes Rhymin Simon (Paul Simon),
152
There Is No Greater Love
(Winehouse), 98
Things Have Changed (Dylan), 11
The Thin White Duke, 58
Thompson, Linda, 109, 157
Thompson, Richard, 109, 158
Throw Down (Fleetwood Mac), 160
Till I Die (Wilson), 38, 39
Time (Bowie), 60
Time Out of Mind (Dylan), 20
The Times They Are a Changing
(Dylan), 11
Todoli, Vicente, on creative
collaboration, 111
Tommy (Townshend), 136
Townshend, Pete: about, xvi, 135; career,
144; expectations of, 142; I Cant
Explain, 141; Lifehouse, 136; Live at
Leeds, 136; My Generation, 141;
partnership with Roger Daltrey, 109,
112, 13546; Quadrophenia, 136; on
Rolling Stones, 133; Tommy, 136;
Whos Next, 136; Wont Get Fooled
Again, 141; See also The Who
Traffic (band), 196
Trilling, Lionel, Sincerity and
Authenticity, 3
Truth Bitter Truth (Faithfull), 68
Truth Doesnt Make a Noise (The
White Stripes), 185
Tumbleweed Connection (John and
Taupin), 165
Tusk (Buckingham), 176
20/20 (Wilson), 38
Updike, John, on celebrity, 116
Van Vliet, Don: about, 75, 175, 194;
partnership with Frank Zappa, 112
Van Zandt, Steve, 127
Vedder, Eddie, 135
Vega, Suzanne, xx
Velvet Underground, 56, 61, 105
Visions of Johanna (Dylan), 21, 24
219
Von Sacher-Masoch, Leopold, 61, 62
Waiting for the End of the World
(Costello), 87
Waiting for the Sun (Hoskyns), 77
Waits, Tom, 7380; about, xvi, 2, 69, 95;
career, 75; Closing Time, 76; Dark Rider,
90; Emotional Weather Report, 77;
as empath, 79; Franks Wild Years, 79;
Heart Attack and Vine, 78; Heart of
Saturday Night, 76; I Hope That I
Dont Fall in Love with You, 7677;
Nighthawks at the Diner, 76, 77;
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards
80; as rabble rouser, 7475; Saving
All My Love for You, 78; Small
Change, 76; Swordfishtrombones, 78, 79;
voice, 74, 76
Wake Up Alone (Winehouse), 93, 104
Wallace, Jonathan, Ethical Spectacle, 16
Wednesday Morning, 3 AM (Simon and
Garfunkel), 152
Welch, Bob, 84
Welcome to the Working Week
(Costello), 85
Whats The World Coming To?
(Fleetwood Mac), 160
When the Musics Over (Morrison),
101
White, Jack: about, 17172, 173, 175, 183,
184, 192; marriage to Karen Elson,
184; The Raconteurs, 189, 190, 198;
relationship with Meg White, 17190
White, Meg: about, 173, 175, 197, 198
99; acute anxiety, 17778, 189;
relationship with Jack White, 17190
The White Album (The Beatles), 118, 136
White Blood Cells (The White Stripes),
177, 18586
The White Stripes (album), 183
The White Stripes (group); about, 171,
173, 17475, 177, 197; Ball and
Biscuit, 187; The Big Three Killed
My Baby, 183; Death Letter, 179;
De Stijl, 172, 177; Elephant, 177, 186,
187; evolution, 180; Get Behind Me
Satan, 186; Hello Operator, 185;
Icky Thump, 173, 175, 178, 188; I
Fought Pirhanas, 18384; Little
220
Cream Soda, 175; musical sound,
176; Passive Manipulation,197;
Seven Nation Army, 177, 18687;
St. Andrew (The Battle Is in the
Air), 188, 200; Sugar Never Tasted
So Good, 184; Truth Doesnt Make
a Noise, 185; White Blood Cells, 177,
18586; The White Stripes, 183; Your
Southern Can is Mine, 185. See also
White, Jack; See also White, Meg
The Who: about, 111, 135, 139, 141, 144,
179, 191; Anyway, Anyhow,
Anywhere, 179; Endless Wire, 137,
144; expectations of, 141142; Here
Tis, 179; history of, 139;
TownshendDaltrey partnership, 109, 112, 13546;
Zoot Suit, 179. See also Daltrey,
Roger; See also Townshend, Pete
Who Are You (TV, CSI series), 140
Whos Next (Townshend), 136
Why Dya Do It? (Faithfull), 65
The Wicked Messenger (Dylan),
196
Wild Things Run Fast (Mitchell), 49
Wilson, Brian, 2739: about, xvi, 2, 6, 28
29, 69, 95, 112; acoustic technology
and, 13; biography, 28;
Cabinessence, 38; California
Girls, 33; Catch a Wave, 32; on
celebrity, 28, 29, 30; comeback, 29;
creative collapse, 29, 3839; Dont
Talk, Put Your Head on My
Shoulder, 35; Do You Wanna
Dance?, 32; emotional vulnerability
in music, 31; 409, 32; Fun Fun
Fun, 32; God Only Knows, 35;
Good Vibrations, 33; Hang On To
Your Ego, 35; I Get Around, 32; I
Just Wasnt Made for These Times,
36; I Know Theres An Answer, 35;
Little Deuce Coupe, 32; Little
Surfer Girl, 32; on love, 29; persona,
57; Pet Sounds, 29, 31, 33, 34, 36;
Please Let Me Wonder, 33; as
producer of music, 30; psychedelic
drugs, 33, 34; recording music and,
30; She Knows Me Too Well, 33;
Shutdown, 32; Smile, 28, 29, 35, 36,
Index
136; Surfin, 32; Surfin USA, 32;
Surfs Up, 9, 38, 39; Their Hearts
Were Full of Spring, 32; Till I Die,
38, 39; 20/20, 38; voice, 27; Wouldnt
It Be Nice, 35; You Still Believe in
Me, 35; See also The Beach Boys
Wilson, Carl, 33
Wilson, Dennis, 33
Wilson, Julie, xx
Wilson, Murray, 33
Wilson, Robert, 69, 79
Winehouse, Amy, 91106; about, 92,
17374, 177, 192, 197, 19899; Back to
Black, 94, 99, 103; Back to Black,
104; biography, 92; Cherry, 97;
eating disorders, 96; Frank, 93, 94, 95,
9698; Fuck Me Pumps, 97; He
Can Only Hold Her, 105; In My
Bed, 98; Just Friends, 104; Love
Is a Losing Game, 104; masks, 94;
Me and Mr. Jones, 10304; My
Tears Dry on Their Own, 104;
Rehab, 94, 96, 99, 103;
self-destruction, 96, 102; Some
Unholy War, 104; Stronger Than
Me, 97; substance abuse, 96, 99;
Take the Box, 98; There Is No
Greater Love, 98; Wake Up Alone,
93, 104; wounded-goddess mirror,
101; You Know Im No Good, 103;
You Sent Me Flying, 97
Winwood, Steve, 196
Wont Get Fooled Again (Townshend),
141
Woodrow, Linda, 166
Woodstock (Mitchell), 42
Working Class Hero (Faithfull), 62, 65
Workingmans Dead (Grateful Dead),
19192
Wouldnt It Be Nice (book, Granata), 31
Wouldnt It Be Nice (song, Wilson),
35
Writing Dylan (Smith), 13, 20
Yagoda, Ben, 2, 3
Yes, 191
Yesterday (McCartney), 130
You Know Im No Good
(Winehouse), 103
Index
Young Americans (Bowie), 56, 59
Young, Neil, partnership with Steven
Stills, 109
Your Song (John and Taupin), 165
Your Southern Can is Mine (The
White Stripes), 185
You Sent Me Flying (Winehouse), 97
You Still Believe in Me (Wilson), 35
221
Zappa, Frank: about, 76, 179;
partnership with Don Van Vliet, 112;
on rock journalism, 171
Ziggy Stardust, 57, 58
Zimmerman, Robert. See Dylan, Bob
Zollo, Paul, 130, 149, 151, 15253
Zoot Suit (The Who), 179
About the Author
DONALD BRACKETT is an art and music critic based in Toronto, Canada.

He is the author of Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos (Praeger, 2007)
and has also written extensively on the subject of creative collaboration in
the arts. He is currently researching and writing a study of twentiethcentury modernism.

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DARK MIRROR

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The paper used in this book complies with the

Chapter 1 The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

Chapter 2 The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

Chapter 3 The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell

Chapter 4 The Role Player: David Bowie

Chapter 5 The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull

Chapter 6 The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits

Chapter 7 The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello

Chapter 8 The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse

Part Two: Continents

Chapter 9 The Seduction Shouters: John Lennon/Paul McCartney

Chapter 10 The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards

Chapter 11 The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/

Chapter 12 The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel

Chapter 13 The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks

Chapter 14 The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin

Chapter 15 The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White

Afterword: Ones Company, Twos a Crowd

the most personally vulnerable and emotionally wounded, with evidence

identified one of the most crucial aspects of todays chorus of voicesthat of

One possible exception to this otherwise accurate observation may be that

makes a great singer-songwriter is usually his or her public telling of personal

Sondheim describes it as technically a very difficult craft, because youre

In most cases, the enigma of a particular singer-songwriter unravels easily,

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position on the matter of communications. It was almost as if he shared a

Part One: Islands

These disturbances cause most singer-songwriters to choose the route of

Considering how difficult it might be for a masterful solo artist to achieve

Part One: Islands

Part One: Islands

Its an intriguing question, why these artists struggle to define themselves

I mentioned earlier that it was not my intent to psychoanalyze these

Part One: Islands

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The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

searching, conducted in broad daylight by the maker of all the masks

The former Mekon member Jon Langford summed up that precarious

The Story Teller: Bob Dylan

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of technically revolutionary soundscapes that served to fuel the dreams of an

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

song-making tradition: they each in their own way contributed to a

seeking enlightenment? What is it about the music that compels us to

After channeling a cultural spirit with which he identified but in which he

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

speed. In January 1965, determined to concentrate on his composing and

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

The music he was trying to produce, a perfectly balanced abstract painting

The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson

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Of course, this is also the ideal definition of what it means to be a dark

The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell