VII. WHY ROCK ’N’ ROLL?

Jimi Hendrix spoke to us next, and we were particularly grateful. His stints playing in famous R&B revues before he formed the “Experience” would certainly have lent him special insight into group-making.

He only appeared as a breeze in the curtains but he was very loquacious.

 

 

Why rock ’n’ roll?

Jimi Hendrix: Some people look at paintings. Some read poetry. Others show others their etchings. These are all fine pastimes, but absolutely un-American. I would go so far as to say that the appreciation of fine art by Americans is for the most part an affectation by those who are ashamed of their colonial provincialism. “Modern Art,” or the art of abstraction and conceptualism, is a Central/Eastern European invention and pertains specifically to their quasi-oriental mathematic sensibility. Oil painting has its Flemish masters, classical music is Teutonic, and opera is an Italian import.

Rock ’n’ roll, on the other hand, is an American art, brought about by the Industrial Revolution, the harnessing of electricity, and the miscegenation of various poor, exploited, and indentured cultures in the USA. Rock ’n’ roll expresses a simultaneous celebration and condemnation of trash culture, class struggle, and imperial privilege.

 

But why start a band?

People are right to question: why another rock ’n’ roll group? Rock ’n’ roll at this point can seem like a despicable pursuit—or at least a singularly embarrassing pastime. There’s the leering, the grimacing, the artlessness, the pointlessness, the dullness, the loudness, the oversaturation of groups, the contractual skullduggery, the apparent self-satisfaction of the groups, the simultaneous self-loathing, the reactionary politics, the objectification of the performer by the spectator, the objectification of the spectator by the performer, the cloying, the copying, and the narcissism, all of which encourage the thinking participant to run in the other direction from any flirtation with the pastime of “groupism.”

Indeed, the modern variety of rock group is often a predictable, soulless, silly, and quite boring entity, comprised of boarding school bankers’ sons, parading about onstage and playing a passable pastiche of some wrongheaded critic’s desert island discs. The groups they cite as influences become more banal every year.

And these critics—people who write about music—are often their enablers and have little or no sense of the history or purpose of the music. While they purport to write about the groups on their “blog” or magazine, they instead type about themselves and also their incidental relationship to the music. It’s a perfect reflection of what the art form has become—a self-perpetuating and pointless exercise, both neutered and inane.

But it needn’t follow this path. When considering subcultures, whether it be beatniks, hippies, urban cowboys, B-boys, Rastafarians, goths, mods, roller skaters, or a thousand other sects, what occurs to us immediately is the musical soundtrack chosen by the initiates of the particular cult.

Each of these postindustrial identity modes is synonymous with a musical movement or style. However, they didn’t start as such. Instead, each sect began with individual outcasts who possessed a particular aesthetic and/or ideology. This may or may not have included music.

Surfers, for example, were existentialist degenerates who abhorred intellectualism, consumerism, and normative ideas about hierarchy and success. They expressed this disdain, or perhaps developed it, through surfing, an activity (long since appropriated by the sport world) pioneered by Hawaiians and remarkable for the spiritual quality its adherents claim for it. The surfer communes with God in the temporal form of a wave. However, despite a mutual antipathy for the system, shared values of sensual anti-intellectualism and daredevilism, and an exclusive dialect and clothing style, these derelicts didn’t think of themselves as “surfers” except in the way that people who drive cars might consider themselves “drivers” or those who eat “eaters.”

 

Surfers didn’t know they were surfers?

 

At this point, the specter of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors and a one-time Southern California resident, chimed in. Jim’s appropriation of avant-garde theater techniques, which had distinguished the Doors from their peers, was evident in his choice of communication. He spoke by spelling words with the steam coming from the teapot which sat in the middle of the table.

 

 

Jim Morrison: It wasn’t until high-energy instrumental groups like the Bel-Airs, the Chantays, and the Del-Tones were playing to crowds of enthusiasts in the environs of Southern California that this assortment of bums and nonconformists recognized themselves by their commonalities, and saw that theirs was an entire culture of surfing, with habits, fashion, mores, and a worldview all of its own. The outside world’s discovery of the surf subculture through records therefore coincided with—and perhaps even precursed—the surfers’ own cognizance of it.

“Surf music,” in the form of frenetic guitar-based instrumental dance music at first, and later in the form of preppie postwop music à la the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, fused the highly individualistic surfer ne’er-do-wells together by inserting them into the public’s imagination and then romanticizing them via the articulation of their distinctive desires, fears, and philosophies.

The surfers themselves were almost certainly not involved in their own codification or commodification, except as spectators. In fact, the surf groups exploited actual surfers and objectified them as fetish dolls in order to give the lost and desperate postindustrial teenyboppers of Southern California—and via them the entire teenage nation—an identity. Soon surf bands were forming in Minnesota (the Trashmen), Indiana (the Rivieras), Colorado (the Astronauts), and elsewhere.

 

Well, a culture needs music . . .

 

Suddenly, a wraith identifying itself as Willie Mae Thornton interjected her two cents. Willie Mae, also known as “Big Mama” Thornton, is best known as the singer of “Hound Dog” and the writer of “Ball ’n’ Chain,” but was also an accomplished musician who traveled with many famous revues.

She spoke via the trembling silverware which, with a little manual prompting, spelled these words out by pointing at letters on the covers of books and periodicals in the room.

 

Willie Mae Thornton: Just as language (of some sort) is indispensable in transforming abstract thought into objectified expression (giving humans their enormous advantage over most animals), music—as a kind of communal language—gives the intuitive, irrational gestures of the alienated outsider an articulation as well, in their desperate attempt to define themselves against a parent culture. It explains them not only to the outside world, but to themselves.

Since music is irrational, impenetrable, and so highly linked to ritual, ceremony, and mystification, it is an indispensable component for the formation of a so-called subculture. Prehistoric man used song before spoken language and it was almost certainly used both for ritual and communicating intertribally.

 

Can you provide another subculture besides surfers as an example?

Another one would be the punks. Punk would transform, of course, but at first it was a midnight-movie “camp” audience who celebrated trash culture and vulgarity, and who were nostalgic for the futurism of modernist art and design. Until punk bands began to express this aesthetic, it had no name—though this malignant sensibility had lurked in people’s hearts for years.

If these bands had not been formed, the prevailing weltanschauung of the disparate and highly isolated population who would become the punks may never have been reported on, and would by now be buried in the silent tomb of eternity. We would only know the ’70s by those other official and/or subcultural groups which did have sonic champions and extroverted interlocutors of their own mystical, vague, and yet distinct ideologies.

In a country alienated from national feeling such as the USA, where individualist, capitalist ideology strongly dissuades identification with the group and instead encourages sociopathic selfishness and greed, subcultural bonding is a radical act. Without rock ’n’ roll, it is virtually impossible.

The question then isn’t “Why?” but rather “How?” As in, “How Does One Begin?”

 

 

With this emphatic call to arms, the force, spark, or breeze through the curtains that was or had been or purported to be the great musician Jimi Hendrix, explained that, instead of a bunch of spirits arguing about the protocol and strategies which would best serve those attempting to form a group, perhaps they should, as a committee, write up an agreed-upon instructional pamphlet, a kind of joint statement by the rock ’n’ roll Comintern of the deceased and renowned.

We were a bit startled to hear this—even disappointed—because we had all been to food co-op meetings and knew that the process to reach consensus can take quite awhile. And in the spirit world, who knows how long awhile is? We agreed to this approach only because we felt we had no choice, and we resigned ourselves to an interminable wait. Before we knew it, though, the first chapter started forming.

The text took the shape of bullet points addressing the situations a group starting out would be confronted with, all transmitted via our spirit medium, who, in a trance, spelled out the words in magic powder or sometimes traced them with a glass on the floor.

As we transcribed the writing, we made pots of coffee and tea in shifts, and nourished ourselves with toast. Before we knew it, we were through. The writing received under these conditions seemed not to be something to edit. The authorship of such an esteemed group was, we decided, best left unbothered, lest some nuance of their intent be mussed up.

Here, then, is the volume they wanted you to read. We have decided to title it: