Guessing the 2020 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees

Out of this list, predicting at least six will be inducted:
Whitney Houston
Nine Inch Nails
Soundgarden
Pat Benatar
Depeche Mode
Todd Rundgren
Notorious B.I.G.

Dave Marsh reviews various books on rock.

The following are excerpts from Dave Marsh's RRC EXTRA No. 49 Dave Marsh on Books.  Subscribe to Rock and Rap Confidential by e-mailing rockrap@aol.com

The best book I read all year was Mark Lewisohn's Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years, Volume 1. I expected data collection. I got data, but also interpretation at a very high level, obsessive reporting and high quality music criticism. Lewisohn understands that the Beatles are still important and, more pertinently, why this is so, which has everything to do with their roots in Liverpool, their relationship not just to American rock 'n' roll and R&B but to other kinds of popular music and to each other, their families, neighborhoods and audiences. Far more than anyone could have expected, Lewisohn goes on for page after page, chapter after chapter, and I, at least, never found it boring for a minute. Maybe that's just because he brings along his own enthusiasm so effectively--which is to say, that he's a writer as much or more than an assembler of information. This is a great book, there's nothing like it in music and damned little anywhere else (it makes The Power Broker seem superficial) and it ends not just before the Beatles go to America, but before they even make "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

Which isn't to say that All These Years can be the whole story, but it takes some reach to get to a new one. Vivek J. Tiwary's graphic novel The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story finds his perch in the life of Beatles' manager Brian Epstein. I say it's his book because he worked on the story for years—first as a film script--but artist Andrew Robinson, much better known in the comics field, has done a beautiful job. (Disclosure: I played a very minor role in helping Vivek, a dear friend, get the book done.) Nobody else has even tried to obtain an insight to what tortures and delights the Beatles must have offered Brian Epstein as a gay man (and I am not referring to whether or not he and John Lennon were lovers--passed off here in a single panel, about as much as it deserves). I sometimes complain that people don't appreciate how difficult it was to have long hair or oppose the war in Vietnam (people literally hated you for it and so no reason to conceal their hatred) but that's nothing compared to what it cost to be a gay man in England or the United States when loving someone of the same gender could get you thrown into prison.

Tiwary doesn't suggest that it was why Epstein died of a prescription drug overdose. He just shows him terrified, blackmailed, frustrated, with this one magnificent outlet to which he contributed everything he had. (In this rendition, which I think probably accurate, he died of accumulated tensions, drugs merely a vehicle.) He's even persuaded me that Epstein wasn't so bad a businessman as I had believed.

I hardly need to add anything about music, except that there are two that haunt me: Graham Nash's Wild Tales: A Rock & Roll Life, the best rock autobiography actually written by its author (unless you believe that hoary old joke about Keith Richards') and living up to its title. My favorite memory, as winter sets in, is Nash and Allan Clarke of the Hollies waiting in a snowfall on the steps of a Manchester hotel for the Everly Brothers, who emerge and treat them kindly. More unforgettable for others will be Nash's description of the utter squalor of Manchester in the 40s and 50s. Dickensian in all the worst ways. (The stuff about David Crosby is Henry Miller-ish in the worst ways.)

            Nash's honest appraisal of his life is exceeded only by Glyn Johns' in Sound Man: A Life Recording Hits with The Rolling Stones, The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Eric Clapton, The Faces . . . This isn't so much a book about recording some of the earliest Beatles demos, or all of the Rolling Stones' albums up to 1975 (as engineer, not producer, because "I don't think Mick and Keith know what a producer is, or does."), Who's Next, the whole of the Faces, the earliest works of the Eagles, Joan Armatrading, on up to the last album of the book, which nobody reading this but me will probably have heard, Benmont Tench's You Should Be So Lucky, a beautiful coda. This is Johns, sometimes a steely presence, at his best. It ends with a wonderful encomium to choral singing (where his life in music began) but I prefer the hilarious page or so in which he plays the unreleased first Led Zeppelin album for Mick Jagger and then George Harrison, and both of them are completely uncomprehending that it might have any value whatsoever. It's full of such yarns and along the way, a grand history of British rock, and the vast ways in which record-making and to some extent music-making have changed in the last half century.

Dave Marsh on Kurt Cobain and the demands of musical "authenticity."

Please feel free to forward or post this RRC Extra widely. We only ask that you include the information that anyone can subscribe free of charge to Rock & Rap Confidential by sending their email address to rockrap@aol.com. If you ever wish to unsubscribe, just send an email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line to rockrap@aol.com.

 

Saturday marked twenty years since Kurt Cobain took his own life. In June 1995, Rock & Rap Confidential  published a special issue, consisting of a 5,500 word exploration written by editor Dave Marsh.

 

LIVE THROUGH THIS.... Last April 6, Kurt Cobain put a gun to his head. On April 8, a workman discovered his body. In millions of heads, including my own, the echo of that shot still has not died.

 

For all that’s been written about Cobain’s death, its foreshadowings and its aftermath, what’s inside that echo has barely been explored. The power that his death holds over our emotions and imagination remains, for the most part, a mystery. It doesn’t come down to anything quite so simple as great songs, a great band, a great singer, or "the voice of a generation." The answer doesn’t lie in poring over the details of his life, either. There was nothing simple about what drove Kurt Cobain to leave this world; there’s nothing simple about what leads any person to choose death (or, in the most desperate instances, to reject death and continue living).

 

But if we can never know what combination of biochemistry, family background, drug addiction, neglect, celebrity, and self-hatred caused Kurt Cobain to obliterate himself, it’s still worth pondering what it says about the rock world, stardom, and our own complicity in it--as fans, critics, partisans, brothers and sisters within a generation and across the gap. If we can’t figure out what Cobain’s suicide says about him, we should at least try to grasp what it says about us.

 

Alternative rock may believe that it discovered the idea that stardom is lethal, that embracing fame and fortune represents a death wish not only for the star but for everyone involved in the process, but that’s a joke. The idea is there in the 1937 version of A Star Is Born, and before that in the story of Icarus, who soared too high in emulation of birds and the gods. But there is something new about the current rock scene’s attitude toward stardom, fame, and its own sense of community. The night that the electrician found Cobain’s body, someone who worked for him approached me in real distress. "I don’t understand how this happened," he said, in genuine mourning. "How do you get through to a guy who feels like a bigger and bigger failure the more people respond to him? And the more he says he’s a failure, the bigger the response."

 

For me, that exchange became part of the echo. It determined how I interpreted his suicide note, and that note deserves more analysis than it’s received. The excerpts Courtney Love read at Cobain’s memorial service last April reveal a lot about the thinking that led him to kill himself. And while it would be crazy to take anybody’s suicide note as the last word on why they did it, it’s equally crazy to ignore it and refuse its implications.

 

"This note should be pretty easy to understand," he wrote. "All the warnings from the Punk Rock 101 courses over the years since my first introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and embracement of your community, it’s proven to be very true. I haven’t felt the excitement of listening to as well as creating music, along with really writing something, for too many years now.

 

"I feel guilty beyond words about these things--for example, when we’re backstage and the lights go out and the roar of the crowd begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love and relish the love and adoration of the crowd..." At which point in her reading, Courtney Love paused and commented, "Well, Kurt, so fucking what--then don’t be a star, you asshole."

 

Then she read on: "...which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact that I can’t fool you, any one of you, it simply isn’t fair to you or me. The worst crime I could think of would be to pull people off by faking it, pretending as if I’m having one hundred percent fun."

 

"Well, Kurt," she interjected, "the worst crime I can think of is for you to just continue being a rock star when you fucking hate it, just fucking stop."

 

Well, he did.

 

Cobain’s commentary on his own demise is a muddle of half-digested contradictions that, in my view anyway, reveal a fundamental quandary that has beset pop stardom since before the advent of punk--since it began to incorporate ideas from the folk music world, really.

 

The "warnings" he mentioned are about selling out, a category that may or may not include commercial success. Selling out in this context really means displaying personal inauthenticity, which is the reason Cobain can express such admiration for Freddie Mercury, a star who lived his life in a closet but one who was true to his own fakery. Punk Rock 101 teaches that the greatest sin is not meaning what you’re doing; and as a perverse corollary, that if you really mean it, it doesn’t matter how jive you are. So we get acts of self-destruction like the Replacements drinking themselves half to death and making it look less like fun than an obligation; Courtney Love insisting her Madison Square Garden audience join her in bellowing racist insults; ordinary fans bruising each other, even breaking bones, in the mosh pit, all in order to "prove their cred."

 

Such an edict represents a curious thing in the annals of popular music. It is not an idea inherent in rock & roll. Who knows if Elvis really meant what he sang in "Mystery Train" or "Heartbreak Hotel"? (He obviously didn’t mean "Hound Dog" and "All Shook Up," and some people never forgave him for it, a fact Cobain might have found useful.) Who cares if Pete Townshend really wanted to die before he got old? Who is crazy enough to believe that Mick Jagger genuinely could not get any satisfaction?

 

Whether Bob Dylan really heard those answers blowing in the wind is another matter, though, and it was the arrival of Dylan and the folkies that begat rock’s cult of authenticity. Dylan was said to be a phony when he tried to sing like Blind Lemon Jefferson on his first album; when he failed to devote "enough" of his time to playing civil rights and other movement benefits after "Blowin’ in the Wind" hit, when he stopped writing and performing "protest" songs after The Times They Are A-Changin', and, of course, when he began playing with a band and electric instruments in 1965. Similarly, rock bands got away with all sorts of folderol in the studio for years, but when the Byrds, the first important folk-rock band, recorded with session musicians rather than just using band members, they found themselves excoriated for it.

 

The roots of the folk scene’s quest for authenticity are deep, going back to the turn of the century when scholars like Francis Child first scoured Appalachian communities for the remnants of Elizabethan balladry and found a host of such songs, akin to the version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" that Cobain learned from Leadbelly, who called it "In the Pines." Child and others found great songs, musical treasures and some of the greatest examples of vernacular poetic and narrative writing in the English language, material that still informs the writing of Dylan, Neil Young, and Allen Ginsberg, among others.

 

The authenticity issue arose in trying to make sense of what happened to these songs when they moved out of the preliterate traditions of the Appalachians (or British village life) and into the stream of urban music-making. Folk music scholars insisted for the next century--some, like Alan Lomax, still do--that Tin Pan Alley songwriters who used folk elements created "inauthentic" songs; folk music arose and was passed along anonymously and orally. There were even supposedly inauthentic instruments on which folk music could not be played--the piano, for example, supposedly existed only in bourgeois households, though a single visit to a juke joint would have blown that idea out of the water.

 

Such thinking suffused the folk song movement as it developed an urban "topical" or socialist realist aspect during and after the Popular Front era of the 1930s. Thus, Woody Guthrie attacked the jukeboxes that entertained America’s working class, in part because such machines put live musicians like him out of work but mainly because, as he put it in a 1947 journal entry, "A folk song tells a story that really did happen. A pop tune tells a yarn that didn’t really take place." Well, after writing "Goodnight Irene," Leadbelly didn’t jump in the river and drown and I presume that Woody wouldn’t have wanted him to.

 

Nevertheless, this ideology had real staying power, finally foundering only when it met Dylan’s impossible challenges, beginning with "Restless Farewell" at the end of The Times They Are A- Changin’. Dylan stopped writing protest songs, I think, because the stream-of-consciousness material seemed "truer," more "real." Meaning that he hadn’t changed his position on authenticity at all, which was just as well, since neither had his audience, as the folkies proved at Newport ’65 by booing, and thereafter, by scrambling to catch up by immersing themselves in ever more "intimate" confessional material, until finally that whole stream came to a dead end in a welter of singer / songwriters as self- pitying as they were self-parodying, who were prominent among the artists who demanded the response punk’s initial assault provided. (Dylan had by then moved on to other things, including the wearing of masks and face paint.) The most prominent Dylan followers today--Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen--have made their strangest, bravest, and most ridiculous moves in the name of being true to themselves on those same old terms.

 

The shaky and querulous alliance between rock and the student left in the late 1960s reinforced the primacy of "authenticity." Political movements, particularly those as rootless and disaffected as the New Left, necessarily require a great deal of suspicion: Radicals need to prove their "authenticity" from time to time to demonstrate that they are not traitors, agents provocateur, or otherwise in league with the bad guys. But the anarchist ideologies of the terminal portion of the Sixties (and almost all of the post-civil rights movement Left, especially in America, became dominated by anarchist thinking) demanded authenticity of another sort: They demanded that people really meant what they said about making the personal political, and so we got, among other things, communes with enforced bisexuality run by the Weathermen, and the drop-out sloganeering of the French and English Situationists.

 

The Situationists were on to something--no need to keep a long face any longer, there’s more than enough material wealth to go around--but their elitism toward activists who did grassroots political work, as opposed to various sorts of "art" and media manipulation, scuttled whatever genuine revolutionary potential they brought to (and took out of) the crisis of 1968. It’s probably more appropriate to think of the Situationists as philosophers than as political radicals, and their philosophy was a species of nihilism: The central tenet, after all, was "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

 

Punk inherited all this when Malcolm McLaren and his cohorts, notably graphic designer Jamie Reid, expropriated Situationist ideas to help build the image of the Sex Pistols, and Clash Svengali Bernie Rhodes followed suit. McLaren, Rhodes, and other punk entrepreneurs essentially took Situationist and anarchist ideas into the realm of promotion, marketing, and advertising. The Pistols, in particular, employed a phalanx of PR men so numerous and so astute they might have made Michael Jackson blush, which rather makes hash of the recent article in B.A.M. that looked askance at Epitaph Records for being so unpunk as to have marketing and promotion departments. Managers like McLaren, Rhodes, and even Miles Copeland, the decidedly non-anarchist C.I.A. scion who handled the Police and founded I.R.S. Records, found such rhetoric useful for a variety of reasons, not least of which was that it allowed them to assume superiority over the acts, who were supposedly mere instruments of theory, after all. (McLaren seems to remain unaware that the Pistols were a great band, or that they had an existence independent of his enterprise, even after he got his clock cleaned in court by John Lydon.)

 

In English pop, the punk revolution changed everything on the surface and nothing at the core; Dave Rimmer’s lost classic, Like Punk Never Happened, a book that traces the punk kids who became Culture Club, captures the result perfectly. Unless you believe that Morrissey is the voice of a generation, punk left British rock spent as a market force and laughable as a culture, depending as it now does on cannibalizing last year’s version of the recycled fads of some previous era.

 

But those first punk kids in London envisioned waging a revolution against the corruption that had undeniably crept into a becalmed and boring rock scene. The terms in which they expressed their disdain for hangers-on and those whose post-hip credentials didn’t quite make it came straight out of the authenticity movements: "Poseurs" was the favorite epithet.

 

It was back in the States that rock’s two streams of authenticity finally come together. You can pinpoint the moment in a single song: Neil Young’s 1979 "Out of the Blue and Into the Black," the song that Kurt Cobain quoted in a part of his suicide note that Courtney Love did not read. Remember that when punk first began to take shape in New York in the mid-Seventies, Young seemed the archetype of the laidback California singer-songwriter, whining "Heart of Gold" and other such gems through his nose. By 1979, though, Young had undergone a couple more of his Dylanesque transformations and he sang "Out of the Blue" twice, once in a folkie acoustic guitar and mouth harp arrangement at the beginning of his album, and then again at the end, against a grinding grunge guitar: "Hey, hey, my, my / Rock & roll can never die," he sang, making it seem like a vampire’s curse, and then, a verse later, "Out of the blue and into the black / You pay for this but they give you that / And once you’re gone, you can’t come back / When you’re out of the blue and into the black." As a critique of suicide, it’s hard to beat.

 

But those aren’t the lines Kurt Cobain remembered when he wrote his note. The line he quoted is the line everyone remembers: "It’s better to burn out than to fade away." But those words don’t appear in the grunge version at all. Only in the folkie one.

 

Rock's quest for authenticity reached Kurt Cobain as legend as much as history. Cobain was eight years old when Patti Smith made Horses and the Ramones stormed England; nine when "Anarchy in the UK." came out; all of 15 when the Clash broke up. These events took place so far from Aberdeen, the little Washington logging town that was his Castle Rock, that they might as well have happened in an entirely different generation.

 

What Cobain received from the first generation punks was inspiration and a set of assumptions. If Kurt Cobain had grown up in the ’50s or ’60s or even the early ’70s--if he was anybody from Lou Reed to Melissa Etheridge--his early encounters with rock & roll almost certainly would have represented a glorious possibility, a chance to communicate across all the gaps in our society--gaps of class, race, region, gender, generation, education, you name it. Used this way, rock’n’roll became not just a "way out" of impoverished working class or straight-jacketed middle class existence but a method of absolutely transforming yourself, a means of becoming who you’d always dreamed of being, confronting your fears with the power to transmute them into assets, a chance to be a hero not only to others but in your own life; to articulate out loud a vision of the world you’d previously have been terrified to whisper into the mirror. Of such things is freedom constructed.

 

But for Cobain, and lots of kids like him, rock & roll offered no such hopes. Instead, it threw down a dare: Can you be pure enough, day after day, year after year, to prove your authenticity, to live up to the music? In short, can you prove you’re not a fake and keep on proving it, without respite? And if you can’t, can you live with being a poseur, a phony, a sellout?

 

Those questions present a classic double-bind: In the first place, demanding "purity" really means proving something you don’t have--that you lack all corruption--and no one can prove a negative. Besides, the elusive notions of purity and authenticity here can barely be articulated, let alone put on display; they are like the Puritan idea of grace, supposedly evidenced through worldly signs, here presented as a kind of hipness or "independence." But establishing such rigid qualifications immediately eliminates ease and freedom, the true hallmarks of independence and emotional authenticity. This setting really does make it easier for a professional poseur like Freddie Mercury than for a raw and amateurish, but heartfelt and insightful, artistic spirit like Kurt Cobain. So Cobain--but not Cobain alone--groped blindly, looking for a transcendence he could feel but which the rules of the game he was playing-at least, the game he thought he was playing-prevented him from reaching. Yet if you don’t reach that transcendence, then, in ways far too lethal to enumerate, you really are a fake. That’s the double-bind and Cobain buffeted around in it for a decade. No wonder his guts ached.

 

Again, there’s nothing inherent about rock stardom in this. John Lennon, to choose a performer in many ways similar to Cobain in his drives and insights, never had to worry about such things. Even at his most despairing, on Plastic Ono Band, Lennon never descended into nihilism, because he expressed his despair in terms that implied that any such obstacle could be overcome, if only the right mechanism--political, personal, psychological, religious--could be located. Even Iggy and the Stooges, by far the darkest band of rock’s first two decades (no "linger on, your pale blue eyes" for the Ig), sounded as if they believed in a way out--or, for that matter, as if the life force in their death trip songs might be so powerful it could drag them out of its own murderous maws. That way out might be painful, dangerous and not a little self-threatening, but it was a pathway out of nothingness, not just another route to describing it but a means of obliterating the hollow core of the everyday and bursting through into free space, beyond all doubt. When you did that, the music promised (and early results demonstrated), the world would change, at least as it presented itself to you, because you had changed.

 

Beyond any of that, Lennon and the Stooges played rock & roll as hedonists, for whom pleasure was central, not foreign. By maintaining their links to the world of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Elvis, they somehow managed a last stand, out of which they took solace, relief--a good time. They could affect any pose they chose from village idiot to irascible artiste, snarling snob to bemused bohemian, so long as it worked--and what worked wasn’t what kept them pure, it was what let them experience this liberating sense of play. "Fake"’ might have been an epithet in which artists like Lennon and Iggy delighted. At the very least, "No Fun" was a situation they didn’t intend to put up with.

 

Kurt Cobain didn’t hear "No Fun" as a protest; he heard it as a description of how things were and how they would stay. In the world he was born to, he literally couldn’t imagine changing things. The best he could hope to achieve was to stay outside the corruption, stay true to his principles, not sell out, never become phony, never fake it. I’m not saying Kurt took no pleasure or solace in music. You can hear that he did all over Nirvana’s records, particularly in the beautiful Unplugged, where he sings songs by everybody from Leadbelly to David Bowie to the Meat Puppets. The love Kurt had for this music--and for his own songs, too--shines bright and hard, like a crystallized essence of what he’s trying to say through the petulance and recriminations of Bleach, Nevermind, Incesticide and In Utero. (One of the greatest series of album titles in rock history, incidentally, a set of images as bloody and beatified as the stations of the cross.)

 

On Unplugged, you can hear Kurt being all the things he dreamed: Unbridled combatant, at war with everyone and everything; self-defeating cynic ("I guarantee you I will screw this song up," he says, by way of introducing "The Man Who Sold the World," and then, so far as I can hear, redeems it); little boy ("Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam"); and his final, lingering, incarnation as a man not yet dead but already haunted on Leadbelly’s "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"

 

Cobain’s version of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", an ancient song known primarily in folk and blues circles (the New York Times ran a marvelous history of it last summer), may be as great a performance in its own way as "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which is only the greatest single rock & roll record of this decade. You can hear Cobain as the pure product of punk and postpunk culture in those songs, but you can also hear him struggling to break free from the cliches imposed upon him. Cobain is looking for several things here. First of all, he’s trying to find a route to community, as the only alternative to the atomized isolation that was killing him and his society. And secondly, he was trying to feel good about it, to locate that moment’s respite that could only come from opening his heart to the embrace offered by so many people who had mocked and ridiculed the geek he used to be. A terrifying possibility but the only life raft he could reach.

 

Undoubtedly, Kurt Cobain came to feel trapped by the adoration of the geek-bashers, the squares, the frat boys who heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as a party song and saw in its bizarre cheerleader video not an anomaly but a true reflection of the world they so comfortably lived in. Trapped, in short, just as Punk Rock 101 told him he would be. When he sings "There’s a friend, there’s a friend, there’s an enemy," he sounds like he’s counting the house at a post-Nevermind show. But oppressive as their presence may have been, the geek-bashers and squares and frat boys aren’t what pushed Kurt Cobain to suicide. How could they have done that? They lacked the imagination and the interest. If philosophical questions about how stardom backfires had arisen for the beer guzzlers in the mosh pit, they’d have moved on. No, I don’t think that Kurt Cobain killed himself to escape the intrusions of Nirvana’s legions of unpunk fans.

 

Which brings us to the punks themselves: an answered prayer to those who lamented the corruption of rock and the rest of popular culture, perhaps, but a sect with, shall we say, certain problems of its own. In a 1979 Village Voice essay, "The White Noise Supremacists," Lester Bangs identified the problems as racism and sexism, and maybe 15 years ago you could limit them to that: "Sometimes I think nothing is simple but the feeling of pain," Bangs wrote at the beginning of his essay, concluding, 5000-odd words later by remarking that he had written "not because you want to think that rock & roll can save the world but because since rock & roll is bound to stay in your life you would hope to see it reach some point where it might not add to the cruelty and exploitation already in the world."

 

If we have learned anything since then, it’s that while feeling pain may be simple, figuring out how to stop feeling it is incredibly difficult and dangerous (maybe Kurt’s stomach really did hurt that bad, maybe the heroin really was the only thing that helped), and that within the bounds of hipness, it’s damn near impossible to figure out how to quit inflicting it--because that can only happen when you learn to feel the pain that you’re causing others, and that can only happen when you let go of your worries about purity and begin the very impure, perhaps unhip process of communicating your most vulnerable hopes and fears with others. In short, when you admit out loud that you can and do hurt, not in any mewling or fashionable fashion but right at the core of your being, which good little alternate rockers are supposed to shield with the true armor of their authenticity. I guess.

 

God knows, this defines perfectly well the dilemma of Kurt Cobain, who wore his abraded empathy more poetically than anyone since Lester Bangs himself. What I have come to love most about the grunge bands--beyond the sheer sonic fury, the slash and snap of their attack and its dark, muddy-yet-crystalline musical ambition that brings me back to my days with the MC5 and the Stooges more directly than even the punks of the ’70s--is their absolute disinterest in the art of the compromise. In the past two years, bands like Green Day and Pearl Jam have completely disrupted the American concert business and given time, they will do the same for records, radio, retail, and maybe even their audiences.

 

They will do this because such musicians operate out of some values that also emerge out of this very history I have spent so much time here describing and criticizing. But they don’t proceed to create from this history the anything-goes decadence that gave us Culture Club and a slew of other interesting British bands who then crashed, full speed, into a brick wall because, if nothing is true and everything is permitted, then finally, making distinctions of any kind becomes an absurdity. Everybody’s a fake.

 

The grunge bands upended that aesthetic by standing up and saying, "No. These things are true, and those things are not permitted." And in this respect, it is unquestionable that the original grunge / neo- punk standard bearer was Nirvana, which took such risks--and standing up for what you believe in, whether that means wearing a "Corporate Magazines Still Suck" tee-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone or playing a pro-choice concert on the site of the first abortion doctor murder, is a risk in truth, a risk among other things of getting caught being sincere but wrong, in either attitude or action, which could cause some to label you: Fake. Phony. Poseur. So not compromising, all by itself, becomes as much a dead-end as just shilling for the bucks. Proving you’re not a fake doesn’t make you feel real--that’s what his suicide note struggled to tell us. And it was then, if at no other time, that Kurt Cobain really did become a spokesperson for his rock & roll generation.

 

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." At one time, back when it became so beloved of Situationists and Satanists, this statement completely invalidated social conformity. But today everybody feels that way: Newt Gingrich, Kurt Cobain, Neil Young, O.J. Simpson, CNN, and most likely, you and me. The credo no longer expresses an undercurrent of rebellion; it’s the prevailing value at the center of everything from the Contract with America to Steve Albini’s production on In Utero to Young’s sad attempt to explain away the consequences of writing "It’s better to burn out than to fade away" on Sleeps With Angels.

 

The song "Sleeps with Angels" doesn’t say a thing to me, although I think it’s the song that’s meant to eulogize Cobain. What does connect to the tale I’ve been trying to tell is "Change Your Mind," a melodic rewrite of "Heart of Gold" and "Down By the River," whose lyric sounds like Neil pleading with Kurt to do the one thing that Young derives his alternate rock credentials from not doing: Consider the consequences. It's Young’s dilemma that touches me most deeply, maybe because nobody who’s spent the past 25 years helping create and define the rock & roll world can help but feel some similar complicity in the Kurt Cobain story, maybe because Young struggles so palpably to convince us (convince himself?) that his ideas could not have had such consequences--and fails.

 

Today, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted" rebels against nothing and liberates no one--and what is rebellion without liberation except the essence of what Kurt Cobain is talking about in that suicide note? What the ascendance of this form of nihilism has given us is another heartless rebuff to a world conceived in exactly such terms: Dirt to those who don’t have riches, spit in the eye for the ones who ain’t hip, contempt for anybody who’d actually try for connections, and above all, a suspicion verging on contempt for anybody whose empathic resonance is so great that an entire generation or even an entire nation would respond to it. The saddest, most pathetic moment in his suicide note comes when Kurt Cobain talks about how much he lacks empathy, how much he envies those who possess it--this from the author of all those songs!

 

And yet, he did connect. No one, not even him, could entirely deny it. People may have taken what they heard, not what Kurt wanted them to hear, but they took great things from Nirvana’s scabrous and beautiful music. In the end, Kurt Cobain may have found this the most frightening aspect of his whole life and career. He thought he was alone in what he felt, and it turned out that in feeling alone, he connected to just about everybody. Such a realization would scare almost anybody; having to live with a truly penetrating awareness of how isolated and beyond solace most everybody in our world feels could scare almost anybody to death.

 

In this respect, Kurt Cobain’s death differed utterly from 1994’s other nihilist suicide, that of Guy Debord, the philosophical eminence behind Situationism and thus a grandfather of punk. Debord shot himself to death last November 30. His friends weren’t surprised and nobody else paid much attention. For a philosopher who devoted his work to writing about representation and communication, it would be hard to define a greater failure. But Debord was no Icarus; he didn’t soar. His theory kept him grounded. Or mired.

 

Kurt Cobain, on the other hand, died as something more than a star, a symbol, or even a generational martyr. He died like the painter Mark Rothko, who killed himself, it would seem, from an excess of feeling. Unlike Rothko, though, Cobain died from being a modernist (a modernist being a person "whose social history is that of a spiritual being in a property-loving world," as Robert Motherwell wrote fifty years ago) who tried to live up to postmodern values. What I have come to believe is that Kurt Cobain did not die because he could not fit in, but because he did. Which is why I can take my solace not from Neil Young’s stumbling for an explanation (much as I relate to it) or from Courtney Love’s vainglorious effort to put the principles that doomed Kurt into practice (compelling as I find Live Through This) or in my friend Gina Arnold’s bittersweet efforts to put the passion of Nirvana’s fans into words, but only in the half-intelligible singing of Michael Stipe on Automatic for the People--a fit epitaph for rock & roll’s first celebrity shotgun suicide, if there ever was one.

 

Stipe said later he and Cobain had been talking a lot, while planning a collaboration; I don’t know what Michael tried to say to Kurt in their last few conversations, but in my imagination, he sings him a lullaby that says, "when you’re sure you’ve had enough / Of this life...well, hang on."

 

I don’t know what really happened--in those talks or in the last days of Kurt Cobain’s life. I do know that those of us left behind had better start singing such things to one another or we will find our way to the ocean, not like the water that runs down so beautifully at the end of Automatic for the People in "Find the River," but like lemmings.

 

Hang on.--Dave Marsh

 

Dave Marsh and ROCK AND RAP CONFIDENTIAL deconstruct Kiss.

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WHY KISS AIN’T ON OUR LIST... Dave Marsh writes: In the fall of 1973, recently arrived in New York City and besotted by the extraordinary shows I’d seen by the New York Dolls in Queens and downtown Manhattan, I decided I wanted to investigate who the city’s best bands other than the Dolls might be. This wound up being a story that ran first in Newsday, the Long Island daily where I had the pop music beat; then Creem, which I was no longer editing but still writing for; and finally the British weekly, Melody Maker.







The article, which may have been headlined Great White Rock in its first appearance, boasted that there were currently a dozen “excellent” rock acts in the New York City area, and talked about eight of those I had seen. In order of appearance they were: The Dynomiters, Harlots of 42nd Street, Kiss, Luger, Elliott Murphy’s Aqua Show, New York Central, Queen Elizabeth featuring Wayne County and Teenage Lust. (I can’t remember why I didn’t mention the Miamis. I loved the Miamis—on stage anyway, like so many of these bands, that group was never captured right on tape.)







Coming up with a punk icon (Wayne County), one of the key New York singer-songwriters of the period whose career has lasted forty years (Elliott Murphy), and a huge pop success in the space of 2,500 words isn’t bad. But history—helped along by Wikipedia which at least three people have tried to amend for accuracy, all rejected by the mysterian Wikiprocess—remembers none of this. If it did, the Kiss Army might salute me rather than flooding my website with what amounts to “nyah, nyah, nyah,” now that Kiss is finally going to get into the Hall of Fame.







Because that article was the first mention of Kiss in the press, and it was not hostile. In its entirety it reads:







“This group looks as if it just stepped out of the underground movie Pink Flamingos, leading me to believe that I was right all along in thinking that the glitter craze was an ugliness contest.







“But Kiss's music sounds as if it is the most thought-out, controlled sound around, and the stage show is just as professional. And, they say, Eddie Kramer (of Led Zeppelin and Electric Ladyland) wants to produce them. Heavy metal meets El Topo.”







OK, I called them ugly. Why the fuck did you think they added the face paint? Other than that, it’s at least a kind of backhanded praise. It’s honest, too. I didn’t like Kiss, but I recognized what they had going for them (though I wish I had mentioned manager Bill Aucoin, a great market manipulator who’s been cheated out of almost all credit thanks to the megalomania infesting that band’s camp.)







Musically, I was done with them before I ever turned the first album over to the second side. Kiss had an extraordinary aptitude for adopting every cliché in hard rock history, and a complete absence of any ability to create so much as a hint of a new one. (I suppose maybe they were the model for Motley Crue?) The most interesting of their studio albums is Destroyer, and it’s not all that interesting, except as an example of the highly professional output of producer Bob Ezrin and guitarist Dick Wagner during the mid-‘70s. On their own, they were not clever at coming up with riffs, the beats are as repetitious as punk but without the energy, and their most interesting lyric is “Beth” which is nothing more than third-rate Bob Seger blended with second-rate Billy Joel, or maybe “Detroit Rock City” which is a clumsy J. Geils swipe...and so forth except for the disco album, I guess.







But they have the best make-up in the Hall. Until Insane Clown Posse is inducted, at least.







I realize this paints Kiss as more mediocre than incompetent, but....well, if the only qualification is having made a record at least 25 years before the ballots got mailed out, they are qualified, and perhaps I shall be fortunate enough not to live to see the advent of Justin Bieber and One Day in the Hall's once formidable list of inductees.







And yeah, Kiss inspired a lot of kids to want to be in bands. So did half a dozen girls (and boys!) in every high school graduating class.







All that mediocrity was harmless enough until the boastful bassist decided to turn it into a propaganda machine for the only two things he’s ever loved: Gene Simmons and money. Sex Money Kiss, his book on how to become a rich success, offers a stupendous (or maybe I mean stupefying) blend of preposterous career advice, dangerously over-simplified and inaccurate economic information and advice, and an account of human intercourse—by which I don’t mean just sex--that verifies emotional stagnation at the age of maybe fourteen. You could figure the same stuff out in maybe fifteen minutes of watching his dumb-ass TV show. (Yes, this means I passed on reading the other two. Pointless repetition is one of the worst things about Kiss.)







Alas, Simmons also has politics, of a sort, though I’d sure he would deny anything of the kind because that might alienate part of the audience—although since he views the rest of the species as essentially a chain of ATMs, maybe not. He is basically a cheerleader for capitalism and spreading the U.S. system abroad in ways that make Bono look like John Maynard Keynes.







Then there are his sexual politics, which amount to “Bend over, meat” and I mean that literally. It is true that Simmons imagines all other human beings (except his sainted mama and perhaps his kids) as inherently inferior to himself, but he has a particular contempt for women. I stopped being amused by this along about the time that he began to boast about his Polaroid collection. The misogynist misanthropy reaches a pinnacle in his 2008 book, Ladies of the Night: A Historical and Personal Perspective on the Oldest Profession in the World.







It seems odd that he didn’t write the book he’s best qualified for on this topic, which would be a history of pimping. Because if Simmons isn’t an evangelist he is certainly a peddler, and he practices the hard sell and the emotional con. Kiss didn’t have fans, it had an Army because they were the biggest band of their era. The truth is, Kiss never sold more than 2 million copies of a studio album although that was precisely the time when the Bee Gees and Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles and a bunch of others began to sell 10 million (and more). One reason Kiss’s audience is early teenagers-- though these days that is true more often emotionally than chronologically, of course—is that only someone stuck there would be so militantly gullible.







Why shouldn’t Kiss be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame? Because they have added not the slightest musical value to rock, which is why they were not especially huge record sellers. And because, so far, in one way or another, the Hall has avoided honoring the music at its most mercantile and shallow.







But above all because there are so many worthy candidates who are not in the Hall of Fame. At the snail ‘s pace at which the Hall parcels out induction, many of the artists in the list below will be dead before they are even on the ballot. In Kiss’s own genre and time, by which I mean 1970s hard rock, almost every fan of it as a whole (as opposed to the Kiss Army) would agree that at least Cheap Trick, Deep Purple, Judas Priest and Motorhead are not just more deserving, but far, far better choices. Not every one of these fifty artists, who operated at more or less the same time as Kiss, are going to end up in the Hall of Fame nor should they. But they’re all better than Kiss.











Alice in Chains



Anthrax



Bad Brains



Bad Company



Black Oak Arkansas



Black Crowes



Blue Oyster Cult



Body Count



Bootsy’s Rubber Band



Canned Heat



Cheap Trick



The Commodores



Deep Purple



Def Leppard



Dio



Foreigner



Free



J. Geils Band



Humble Pie



Iron Maiden



The James Gang



Rick James



Joan Jett and the Blackhearts



Judas Priest



Krokus



Living Colour



MC5



Molly Hatchet



Mother’s Finest



Motorhead



Mott the Hoople



Mudhoney



New York Dolls



Ted Nugent / Amboy Dukes



Ohio Players



Pantera



Poison



Procol Harum



The Scorpions



Sepultura



Social Distortion



Soundgarden



Steppenwolf



Twisted Sister



Ten Years After



Thin Lizzy



The Time



War



W.A.S.P.



White Zombie







(This list was compiled by RRC, not Dave Marsh alone.)

Dave Marsh on Pete Seeger.

RRC Extra No. 41:Dave Marsh on Pete Seeger

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A GOLDEN THREAD, A NEEDLE….Dave Marsh writes:  I met Pete Seeger about 40 years ago on the Clearwater, a refurbished 19th century sloop which had begun its then seemingly hopeless task of cleaning up the shores and waters of the Hudson River. Like a lot of the things that Pete got involved in, it was a hopeless task until it turned out to be common sense. 

That day, we cruised Long Island Sound, if I remember right, from Port Jefferson to Oyster Bay, which is not very far, and back, which is still not very far. It was worth every minute, and would have been if only for the chance to spend time aboard the 106 foot, single-masted Clearwater, a gorgeous vessel, stable even in Long Island Sound’s considerable chop and carrying as cargo volumes of lore and lessons about the costs of environmental neglect.

            You could  say that those early Clearwater voyages were the precursors of the present-day celebrity cruise, but with fewer celebrities. No more were needed. Pete Seeger was not only the enduring star of American folk music, he was its leading evangelist and one of the greatest singer/musicians this part of the planet has produced.  I remember Pete singing though not what songs, and some lectures about the important work of the ship and the ecology of the Sound and the Hudson River region, though not their specific content. The presentation did its best to be as folkie as a much-darned pair of wool socks, and unmistakably also an event with a star and a crew and an audience, never exactly commingled. It was also a strong, healthy political event, by which I mean that each of us left with a sense of mission and some ideas about how to execute it.

            I wasn’t there to clean up the Sound, though I was glad to be part of the movement, or to hear Pete perform, though I knew the importance of his music. I was there to write a story for Newsday, the Long Island daily. I did what you do in those situations, where you don’t know anybody and nobody knows you, which mostly means I watched and listened and took mostly the kind of sensory notes that you don’t write down on the spot.

            When we docked everyone headed for the parking lot. Pete and his wife Toshi had several bags. I introduced myself, not only because we were meant to talk for a few minutes, but as a prelude to asking if I could help carry their stuff.

            I got no further than, “Hi, I’m Dave Marsh from Newsday,” before Pete turned to me and snapped—and I mean snapped, like he was already booking me for malingering—“Grab a couple of those bags. It’s good for white collar workers to do physical labor.” Thus spoke the Harvard gentleman to the brakeman’s son who’d never owned a necktie.  And no, I didn’t come up with my usual smartass retort. He was Pete Seeger, who had changed not only my life but the world, and the alternative to silence was insulting him as much as he’d just insulted me, and…well, for once it was not in me.

That incident was one of the best lessons I ever had several times over. I learned lessons I’d chew on for, apparently, the rest of my life: The relation between stardom and shyness, between changing the 

world and retaining your self, and between trusting your perceptions and remembering not to suppose 

anything until you’ve made sure the person about whom you’ve just supposed it is not a cartoon.  

And I mean it, I’ve always been grateful because that dressing down has saved me all manner of grief, and not only in things about celebrity. The most important lesson, you see, was about recognizing a difference between loving something and liking something, even when that something is someone. A great teacher may or may not inspire great affection, and he or she may not even teach the best lessons deliberately. So it turned out that Pete and I were in many social and professional situations over the next 40 years without ever getting to know one another much and that isn’t surprising. Mainly because I didn’t learn my lesson all at once. Though I think I did learn, finally. I’ll tell you about it later. 

I respected Pete Seeger so much that my teenage self forgave him writing “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” which to my ears was sheer bathos, and for deriding Bob Dylan’s beautiful electric music, which to my ears was the absolute poetry of a world in chaos.

            One side of what he did was somewhat foreign to me. Years later my friend Jon Landau and I were talking about folk music one day, which inevitably came around to talking about Pete. Jon told me a story about Pete appearing at his left-wing summer camp or maybe it was Earl Robinson’s music school. I said  something I thought was appreciative and Jon stopped me cold. “You don’t understand,” he said. “He was Elvis.”

            To me, he was more like a father figure or anyhow that’s the way I made sense of him after I understood that he had many metaphoric children and was glad of it, though not always of the way that they behaved, musically or socially. (Hmmm, that is like Elvis, isn’t it?) He could be amazingly contradictory—a sign of humanity not deity. In his 1972 anthology, The Compleat Folksinger, which collects among other things many of his columns for Sing Out!, Pete wrote about a tour of Czechoslovakia he made in 1964. He was especially thrilled to go to a particular club and hear the 

groups playing guitars, which happened to be electric.

            Back home, Pete was not only immune to Beatlemania but hostile to folk-rock. Maybe it was because, as Pete said, he couldn’t hear the words due to the high volume but he should have known more about music than to use that to justify attacks on the songs themselves. I’m more inclined to think that he didn’t like “Maggie’s Farm” with the Butterfield Blues Band because of the loud absence of explicit social commentary and Pete’s acknowledged absence of feeling for post-war blues.

I am trying to reckon with the complexity of Pete Seeger as man and artist. It is not an easy road to travel, especially not today. But it never has been.

            Ten years ago, more or less, there was a panel discussion at a Folk Alliance conference that wound up in a tangle when Nora Guthrie said that Pete had refused to allow Madonna to issue a recording of “If I Had a Hammer” because she’d changed the lyric to “If I had a hammer / I’d smash your fucking head in.” (I don’t know if that’s funny. Depends on how she sang it, doesn’t it?)

Another complex folk music elder, Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, also on the panel, thought 

that Nora was responsible for the rejection and scolded her for not asking Pete to make the decision, since he would surely have supported free speech. I was the moderator and tried to help out by asking Nora if what she meant was that she had communicated a decision made by Pete himself.  She said yes. Chris began to sputter, well past the point of coherence for few seconds, and finally a single sentence burst out: “WELL...well...well...then Pete’s not God anymore!”

            He never was. He never needed to be. Like everybody else, Pete Seeger set examples good and bad. We might pause here to take notice that, though his feet were of clay, he had a remarkable ability to keep them shod. By which I mean, his transgressions may have been personal but they were very rarely public and he knew how to back down. In 1967 or so, he made a record using electric guitar—not played by him--and somewhat heavier beats. And then returned to doing what he did, as he should have. 

            Pete Seeger was such a prodigious talent, so young, that the godlike was expected of him. Born in 1919, the son of the ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, he grew up in a left-wing household. It was the mandarin left wing: Like his father before him, Pete went to Harvard. He began his prominent performing career in 1940 on CBS Radio, alongside Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and Josh White (the show was heard only in New York because the cast was integrated) and a year later was a founder of the first important left-wing folk group, The Almanac Singers, which defined protest singing. Pete Bowers, he called himself then—he had to, as his father was currently a government employee who had been blacklisted during World War I for espousing pacifism.

            After the war, Pete formed the Weavers with Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert. Their songs were not always topical, because McCarthyism had begun, but the political songs were always there and they had big hits. Thus “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” though the Weavers also rearranged Lead Belly’s “Good Night Irene” into one of the most important hits of 1950. Seeger and Hayes were a formidable songwriting team.  Because of them,  the Weavers also produced some of the most enduring post-war protest songs, notably “If I Had a Hammer.” By 1953, they were blacklisted by broadcasters. “If you had seen us coming down the street,” Toshi Seeger, Pete’s wife, told me once, “you’d have crossed over to the other side of the block.” I looked dubious. “That’s exactly what people did,” she said.

            Toshi, at least as formidable and complicated as her husband, allowed herself the bitterness Pete never expressed. They had a lot to be bitter about. After being smeared as a Red,  Pete became an unusually uncooperative witness before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in 1955. HUAC had caused the Hollywood Ten to be imprisoned for contempt of Congress in1950. The Ten lost for standing on the First Amendment as the basis for their refusal to testify. Since then, it had become the practice to stand on the Fifth—the non-incrimination clause--rather than freedom of speech and association. Pete returned to the fundamental issue: “I am not going to answer any questions as to my association, my philosophical or religious beliefs or my political beliefs, or how I voted in any election, or any of these private affairs. I think these are very improper questions for any American to be asked, especially under such compulsion as this."

This was not god-like. It was human-- stubborn, flouting all sound advice, courageous. It was also not quite as futile as it immediately seemed.  In 1957, he was charged with contempt of Congress. In 1961, Pete was tried, convicted and sentenced to a year in prison. In 1962, he won his appeal, a landmark case in ending the blacklist. But the consequences rolled on: The Weavers reformed in 1955, but mainly as a live act. They recorded for small labels but their music could not be broadcast. Nevertheless, they played the major role in popularizing “Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight),” “Sixteen Tons” and “Kumbaya.”

 Pete was never idle. In the Fifties, he wrote How to Play the 5 String Banjo, invented the Longneck Banjo (three additional frets made it longer than a bass guitar), popularized the 12 string guitar (he’d learned from Lead Belly), and created the brilliant “Goofing-Off Suite,” using classical themes by Bach, Beethoven, Stockhausen and Grieg alongside Berlin’s “Blue Skies” and a batch of folk tunes. When John Hammond at Columbia finally got him a major label record deal, one of the first results was “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” probably the most beautiful antiwar melody ever composed. Pete championed the burgeoning topical song movement in the best possible way: He crammed the songs into his albums and concerts. He also took up world music, not as a stylistic synthesis, but as a collection of pieces that taken on their own terms resonated with one another, from Africa (“Wimoweh”) to Cuba (“Guantanamera”), even Europe. It was Pete who suggested that SNCC needed a singing group, and it was Toshi and Pete who befriended and cared for Bernice Johnson Reagon when the SNCC Freedom Singers broke up. He made children’s albums and live albums and thematic albums and mere collections of songs. He was instrumental in starting the Newport Folk Festival. He was on the editorial committee of Sing Out!, the Rolling Stone of the folk revival. And he played a major role (if not the central one—that credit he always gave to Guy Carawan and rightly so) in adapting and popularizing the most important song of the twentieth century, “We Shall Overcome.”

            Pete made a live album called We Shall Overcome, recorded at Carnegie Hall in 1963. It was extremely well-edited, I don’t know by whom. The running order of the album--13 songs of the 40 performed--has absolutely nothing to do with the order of the concert, but it’s more focused, gets to the point more directly and clearly than the show did. Alas, the digital version is the whole thing. ( (It’s easy to make a playlist of the original running order—the original track listing is at the Wikipedia entry for the album.)

            I heard the We Shall Overcome album at age 14, when I was the son of budding George Wallace supporters, living in an Up South town full of Ku Klux Klansmen and packs of freelance racists, and going to quietly but adamantly all-white schools. The headlines had been filled every day for the past year with Freedom Riders, pre-teens slaughtered by bombs placed in churches, nonviolent demonstrators attacked by dogs and high pressure hoses. And that was just in the South. Racial turmoil was a constant presence in southeastern Michigan, not just Detroit. The one true thing I was being told about this was that it meant the world, or a world, was coming to an end. The one set of contrary facts I held in my head was almost entirely musical, not the early songs of Bob Dylan but Motown and early soul music that insisted, obliquely but powerfully, that freedom meant everybody or it didn’t mean anything.

            Buying We Shall Overcome was more the product of exploration than rebellion. What it inspired was rebellion’s necessary partner, conviction. Most important, the conviction that there really must be a better world, somewhere, and that it was open to the likes of myself. Pete Seeger’s version of a protest album offered a vision, and the core of that vision was not so much any particular songs but the gentle persuasiveness with which he introduced them, the passion with which he laid out their origin or history or contemporary relevance and the power with which he encouraged all present to sing them. What transformed We Shall Overcome from a powerful collection to something with deep historical significance was the presence of the SNCC Freedom Singers. They lent not so much authenticity as boldness and authority to “Oh Freedom,” “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus,” and particularly “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” They made struggling for equal rights seem like something even a blossoming but isolated teenager could do.

            As Daniel Wolff pointed out to me the afternoon that we learned of Pete’s passing, he did this kind of teaching all the time. Seeger believed in singing, he believed it was good for you in all sorts of ways. He was, I recall, fond of reciting his father’s dictum that a country’s cultural health could best be ascertained by how many of its citizens sang and made music. I was just one among who knows how many—a number surely in the hundreds of thousands, maybe the tens of millions, over the sixty years or so that Pete performed—who had their lives turned if not upside down at least askew by the power of his conviction, by the contagion of his vision.

            If nothing else, Pete Seeger made me understand how far behind enemy lines I was living—he showed me the road that had to be traveled, if I really wanted to live. He did this the same way that James Baldwin and Elvis Presley and John Coltrane did it: by example, and with the same generosity and the same sense that the world was packed with a load of insurmountable cruelty and that, nevertheless, the truth was that something better had managed to survive within it. Which meant, for each of us, a choice and a chance.

            It may even be that Seeger, whose rectitude often communicated, at least to me, a whiff of the Puritanism he inherited, offered a more direct route to this not-at-all specious salvation of spirit and society than anybody else, and for the oddest reason: He thought smaller. He genuinely believed that one more singer, one more non-violent resister, one more example of gumption and love, one more song, one more guitar, was an important thing. And, this I am sure about, he genuinely believed that that was mainly what he, himself, was: One more.

            That, and nothing more meek, was why Pete Seeger eschewed the celebrity path. (Ask yourself this: If Burl Ives could become a big star looking like that, what could the young Pete Seeger have become if he’d just given over a few names?) Pete could seem innocent but you’d be a fool to believe it. He paid the price and he had seen the bill coming, too.

            If all you know about Pete Seeger is a protest singer, a rag-tag Red, a spinner of false hope, a doddering old man walking that hopeless line (but never by himself, you may have noticed), then you missed it. If all you know is the famous songs – most of which I haven’t even mentioned—you might even then not see it whole. Pete Seeger lived his life every day in the possession of what he envisioned.

There is one song that to me expresses this vision almost perfectly, maybe the greatest of all the lyrics he wrote and in the performance on his mini-box set, A Link in the Chain, possibly his greatest recorded vocal performance. It is called “O, Had I A Golden Thread.” It’s sweet in a way the hard boys, left and right, fear, as they ought to. “Far over the waters I’d reach my magic band / To every human being so they would understand.” He makes it true. He makes those who hear him want to make it truer.

             Without such a vision, the folk process that we talk about (or used to, before the scene shifted to singer-songwriters meditating on their inner lives—alas, almost never about the banality of them—and the preening cultists they attracted) isn’t worth much. But there is another question, which is whether Pete’s vision of freedom carries forward, whether it stands, whether it can be nurtured and sustained. 

            I am sure it will be and my conviction came, perhaps predictably, on  the last night of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s magnificent Woody Guthrie tribute in 1996. Pete already wasn’t singing very much—Arlo led the night’s final song, which you knew was going to be “This Land Is Your Land” before you ever saw a ticket. But you didn’t know that the whole cast, including many of the conference’s speakers, would be on stage leading the singing.

It had been a night of triumphs: For Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls, for Dave Pirner and Jimmy LaFave, Billy Bragg and Jack Elliott, Bruce Springsteen and Pete too. But the most powerful triumph was that group sing—above all for the spirit still embedded in a potential national anthem yearning for a country to become worthy of it. It floored me and really, it seemed like the moment caught everyone. John Wesley Harding and I, old friends, walked into the communal dressing room afterward, arms around each other’s shoulders, tears in our eyes.  And there was Pete, with tears in his eyes.

            I think it was the first time I’d ever truly seen him. He was pleased, I understood, not so much that the night had carried Woody and what he represented forth in such grand fashion. What I remember seeing in Pete Seeger’s  eyes was a sense of relief. He knew something that night—if I’m right—something important about not just Woody’s work, but his own. Which meant also the work of all the people he’d learned from, and all those  who’d taught them, from the slaves who came up with “O Freedom” to Mother Bloor writing the labor history Woody made into music. He knew that folks would try to carry it on, in both spirit and substance.

That linkage is the golden thread and its purpose now is weaving the garment of human survival, which was the explicit theme of Pete Seeger’s last few decades on the planet.  A rainbow design without which we cannot live. A design that shows us why and how to keep the most important thing that Pete Seeger represents alive.

            We cannot experience the full measure of what it means to lose Pete Seeger until we realize that this burden is not his to carry, anymore. Now, it’s on you. And me.

Got any bags you need carried?

(Thanks to Craig Werner, Danny Alexander, Daniel Wolff and Lee Ballinger, without whom grief might have overwhelmed coherence.)