IT’S FIFTY YEARS since John Lennon wrote ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The song took its name from a children’s home he remembered from his days growing up in Liverpool. But in truth it’s not about the children’s home. Like a lot of the Beatles’ greatest records, like a lot of great pop records, it’s not about anything so much as the emotional state John Lennon was going through when he wrote it. John had taken LSD. This had led him to conclude that real life was a dream and the real truth was however he happened to be feeling. The key line of the song, the one that rings down the years, is ‘nothing is real’.
In these essays I want to look at pop music’s obsession with what’s real and what’s not, with what’s authentic and what just sounds as though it’s authentic, and the whole complex, often contradictory business of how some people get to be regarded as ‘credible’ while others are not.
I’m not one of those people here to tell you that this is the new classical music. I don’t believe that. As soon as people start talking about pop music as though it’s Stravinsky they immediately take away half of what I like about it: they take away the personality, the pretension, the absurdity, the constant battle between career and ego and art (with a small ‘a’). As soon as you approach pop music with a furrowed brow it flees. Ever since the heavy papers started covering it people have worried about pop far too much. I come from a different point of view. Pope John Paul II said, ‘Of all the unimportant things football is the most important.’ I feel the same way about pop music.
What interests me is what our struggles with it tell us about ourselves. I’m fascinated by the contortions we get ourselves into when trying to justify and validate the simple pleasure we get from the music. If we like something we apparently have to find a way to prove that it is more worth our while than the things we like less. One of the ways we do this is by deciding whether it is or is not real. This has particularly dogged popular music ever since the Beatles.
One of the key ways in which pop differs most sharply from classical music is that the personality and background of the people performing the music are as important as the music itself. This didn’t begin with the Beatles. I trace it back to John Lomax. Lomax was born in Mississippi just after the American Civil War. During the 1920s and 1930s he made his living on the borders between academia and showmanship. Radio had just become widespread and there was a feeling that the old music, which was somehow deemed authentic because it was old, was in danger of being driven out by this new music, which couldn’t possibly be authentic because it was new. Lomax set himself the job of journeying out into rural America and finding the people who still sang the old songs, or even better made up songs themselves. These would ideally be people whose experience was not tainted by exposure to mass media or the conventions of polite society.
On one of these field trips, to the fearsome Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana, he found and recorded Huddie Ledbetter, who was serving time for murder. Ledbetter was an imposing man who had acquired the name ‘Lead Belly’. Lead Belly knew lots of songs, from children’s favourites to Broadway show tunes, but Lomax was mainly interested in the kind of songs that might be plausibly sung by a guy with the name Lead Belly. These would be songs about suffering, privation, violence and death.
John Lomax knew what his audience, who considered themselves sophisticated, were looking for. There is nobody so easy to fool as the person who thinks he knows something and the audiences for Lomax’s field recordings, who were predominantly academics and leftists, had an appetite for hearing about suffering. Whereas the wealthy tourists going to the Cotton Club in Harlem might have preferred to be entertained by happy-appearing negroes, the people at Lomax’s illustrated lectures in university towns wanted to hear about misery, and Lomax was happy to provide it.
Musical accounts of suffering were his stock in trade. In 1940 he cornered the Georgia street singer Blind Willie McTell in a hotel room in Atlanta and got him to play almost all his repertoire. The conversations between songs were picked up on the recording and are very illuminating. What Lomax keeps nagging Willie for is what he calls ‘complaining songs’, particularly songs complaining about how the white man treats the negro. Blind Willie McTell pretends not to know what he’s talking about and instead plays him his new one, a perky tune in praise of romantic love called ‘King Edward Blues’, which was inspired by the abdication of the English throne. You feel for Lomax. He’s come looking for reality and the grittier the better. Instead he gets Hello! magazine.
When Lead Belly made his first East Coast appearance in front of an audience of a thousand academics in evening dress, Lomax winced when he saw him pass the hat around afterwards. ‘Smacked of sensationalism,’ he huffed. However, he and Lead Belly both profited from the promotion of the personality of the singer being billed by the newspapers as ‘the sweet singer of the swamplands here to do a few tunes between homicides’. This is what they call in the days of TV talent shows ‘the backstory’.
Lead Belly was a pioneer of what we might call unpopular music. That is, music that’s simple and catchy but doesn’t actually command a large audience. They didn’t care for Lead Belly up in Harlem so he confined himself to playing for prosperous white audiences. He attached himself to Lomax as driver, guide, ambassador and demonstrator of material. This is how he came to be appearing with him on stage from time to time wearing convicts’ stripes or the bib and braces of a farmhand, even though in real life he favoured double-breasted three-piece suits much as Jimmy Cagney would have worn. In this he was merely meeting audience expectations. The further an audience is removed from the reality of the working life the more they like to feel that they are being entertained by somebody who has actually lived that life.
Twenty years after Lead Belly came to New York a university dropout called Robert Zimmerman arrived in the same city to make a name for himself as a folk singer. The name he chose was Bob Dylan, not for Dylan Thomas but for the character Matt Dillon in the Western TV series Gunsmoke. He told the people in the big city that he’d run away with the circus as a child, that he’d hopped freight trains, that he’d learned how to play the guitar from an old bluesman called Wigglefoot. It was all entirely made up, every last bit of it, but the people he told it to didn’t query it because they badly wanted to believe it was real. They wanted to believe it because believing in Bob Dylan made his performance of old folk songs easier to believe in. As Joni Mitchell pointed out almost fifty years later, ‘Bobby invented a character to deliver his songs.’ In fact I would argue that Dylan’s single most creative act was to invent Bob Dylan and then to remain behind that mask, never once letting it slip, for over fifty years.
When I saw him a few years back at the Albert Hall he did one of the most remarkable bits of business I’ve ever seen on the rock stage. When it came time for the curtain call he and his band lined up centre stage. They had their hands at their sides like cowboys making ready to draw. They didn’t touch each other or smile at us. They just looked out at the audience for a full minute and then, obeying some unseen and unheard signal, the tableau broke up and they left the stage. It struck me that, despite the complete absence of pyrotechnics, smart lighting and obvious staging, this was one of the most theatrical things I’d ever seen on a rock stage. Far more convincingly theatrical than, for instance, David Bowie. It could only have happened the way it did because somebody, presumably Bob Dylan, planned it that way. Was it real? It was about as real as a musical number in a Busby Berkeley movie.
We make a lot of those pop acts who go in for obviously theatrical presentation. In fact the most theatrical acts are the ones who don’t appear theatrical at all. The Pet Shop Boys often perform in masks and surround themselves with dancers. Does that make them any more or less theatrical than, say, U2, whose entire act is a celebration of ordinariness on a massive scale? Probably not. The set of Look Back in Anger is every bit as much an artifice as the set of Aida. Bruce Springsteen’s act is no more real than Beyoncé’s. It’s all to do with expectations. Springsteen’s audience wouldn’t like it if he came on dressed in an expensive suit. Beyoncé’s audience wouldn’t like it if she came on in denim and leather. The difference between the two audiences is that Beyoncé’s know they’re seeing a show whereas Springsteen’s think they’re seeing something somehow more real.
Nothing in this business is real. The theatrics in pop don’t begin when the lights go down. Keith Richards is Keith Richards twenty-four hours a day. That’s why he’s endured. The gravel-voiced boozer polymath character that we know as Tom Waits was developed by young Thomas Waits while working as a doorman at a California club. He was so good at entertaining the crowd that some nights there were more people outside the club than inside. This was method acting on a full-time basis. It was only by building the Tom Waits character that he could then get away with writing the kind of songs that Tom Waits would sing.
Most recently the artist known as Seasick Steve, who appeared as if out of nowhere on BBC TV in 2006 and claimed to have spent most of his sixty-plus years as a hobo bluesman, was revealed to have actually spent most of his career doing what jobbing musicians do, which is playing wherever somebody will pay, even if that means performing middling disco records, the sort that hobo bluesmen are reckoned to have little truck with. Will it affect his career? That probably depends on how good his material is.
People like Springsteen and Waits have reached a workable compromise between the people they are and the people that other people pay to see them act out on stage. Their artistry isn’t confined to their songs. It extends to their persona as well. They know what they would do and what they wouldn’t. John Lennon, who sang ‘nothing is real’, never got the chance to work that out for himself. He was the person who called himself the working-class hero, which is something he certainly wasn’t. Like Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan he had made sure that he knew as little as possible about the working life.
Other people find it harder to draw the line. Richey Edwards of the Welsh punk group the Manic Street Preachers was challenged by a journalist to prove how much he lived out the music he played. So he took out a knife and carved the words ‘for real’ in his arm. One of the reasons Kurt Cobain of Nirvana killed himself in 1994 was that he felt bad about making many millions of dollars doing something he would happily have done for free.
Cobain’s last performance was a recording of the show Unplugged for MTV. Unplugged was the pinnacle of rock’s affair with authenticity. Here the hit acts were encouraged to do away with their amplification and special effects and just perch on stools and play, as if in this act of stripping away the performer would reveal his real self. Cobain finished with a song by Lead Belly. It was the best performance he ever did.