The great magic moments of rock'n'roll
By Michael Herr. Excerpt from the book 'Rock Dreams', by Guy Peellaert and Nic Cohn.
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There's a famous photograph of Elvis Presley being kissed on either cheek by two beauty queens, while he looks into the camera. I don't think that anybody else in the history of show business (or of photography for that matter) had ever looked that way at a camera before, with such a complete mixture of aggression and submission, with such possession, possessing himself for certain, and probably anybody else who happens to be looking: at the amused ardent curve of the nostrils, the young ravished lips, the love-burning eyes. Peaceful as a drowned man, or an angel sent in to announce the final triumph of everything hot, wet, and oral, the look on his face distorts the physical evidence of what's happening, you're left feeling that if the two women are really kissing anybody it's each other, and that Elvis is gone, out through the lens and the light and the back of your brain (where he leaves an inerasable shadow on the wall, a miraculous imprint like the shroud of Turin), and away into the endless lonely spaces of his own unprecedented super Stardom, where we can't watch him anymore. Presence as absence, right there and not there at all. The Elvis of our dreams.
Rock Dreams are old-timer's dreams, and seemed so even ten years ago, when the book was first published and its creators were still chronologically young. They're like dreams from some deeply felt late Autumn, when the light is pouring into the ground and the elegy-making impulse is most fluent, sending you dreaming looking back over whatever seems to be completing itself, any phenomenon that is losing its heat; such as the breathtaking loop the culture made between 1945 and 1970, the loop that described and contained the great magic moment of rock and roll. In 1973, rock and roll was performing the very self-conscious convulsions of its second ritual little death and had all but passed over into the shadow form; "surviving in pockets", kept clinically alive in the margins by a few records every year, and by the scattered faithful, who (we know now), were right to stay true. It would stand again and breathe with its old internal vigor, there would be more rock and roll and more rock and roll history.
There just wasn't going to be anymore rock and roll as history. That groove in time was worn down and gone, just like a thrill, and many people were having a rough time living in a world without it. Men and women in their thirties were behaving like spoiled boys and girls, pining for the old tribal jukebox jive and the days of common climax. It was a time of unparalleled bitterness in the culture. The world rock community had fractured beyond hope of restoration, and was so cynical in all its jagged bits that the membership either denied any knowledge of the former unity, or stoned itself blind with nostalgia, the drug of forgetting that's at least as effective as alcohol. Feelings ran high against the stars who had survived the 1960s, and the casualties were mourned with resentment.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
There's a famous photograph of Elvis Presley being kissed on either cheek by two beauty queens, while he looks into the camera. I don't think that anybody else in the history of show business (or of photography for that matter) had ever looked that way at a camera before, with such a complete mixture of aggression and submission, with such possession, possessing himself for certain, and probably anybody else who happens to be looking: at the amused ardent curve of the nostrils, the young ravished lips, the love-burning eyes. Peaceful as a drowned man, or an angel sent in to announce the final triumph of everything hot, wet, and oral, the look on his face distorts the physical evidence of what's happening, you're left feeling that if the two women are really kissing anybody it's each other, and that Elvis is gone, out through the lens and the light and the back of your brain (where he leaves an inerasable shadow on the wall, a miraculous imprint like the shroud of Turin), and away into the endless lonely spaces of his own unprecedented super Stardom, where we can't watch him anymore. Presence as absence, right there and not there at all. The Elvis of our dreams.
Rock Dreams are old-timer's dreams, and seemed so even ten years ago, when the book was first published and its creators were still chronologically young. They're like dreams from some deeply felt late Autumn, when the light is pouring into the ground and the elegy-making impulse is most fluent, sending you dreaming looking back over whatever seems to be completing itself, any phenomenon that is losing its heat; such as the breathtaking loop the culture made between 1945 and 1970, the loop that described and contained the great magic moment of rock and roll. In 1973, rock and roll was performing the very self-conscious convulsions of its second ritual little death and had all but passed over into the shadow form; "surviving in pockets", kept clinically alive in the margins by a few records every year, and by the scattered faithful, who (we know now), were right to stay true. It would stand again and breathe with its old internal vigor, there would be more rock and roll and more rock and roll history.
There just wasn't going to be anymore rock and roll as history. That groove in time was worn down and gone, just like a thrill, and many people were having a rough time living in a world without it. Men and women in their thirties were behaving like spoiled boys and girls, pining for the old tribal jukebox jive and the days of common climax. It was a time of unparalleled bitterness in the culture. The world rock community had fractured beyond hope of restoration, and was so cynical in all its jagged bits that the membership either denied any knowledge of the former unity, or stoned itself blind with nostalgia, the drug of forgetting that's at least as effective as alcohol. Feelings ran high against the stars who had survived the 1960s, and the casualties were mourned with resentment.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
The Rolling Stones. Then there were three, because the fourth had also grown exhausted,and the complete gang only reassembled on certain special occasions, when they were tired of seclusion and decided to raid the public parks. Now, in the search for continuous novelty, their games were everchanging: in turn they played at revolution, and they played at martyrdom, and they even played at sanctity. Sooner or later, however, all flavours bored them.
Sam Cooke. Sam Cooke, shot dead in a motel, was black but dressed up white, sang Soul but wrote Teendreams, wagged his ass but gently, with a certain deference.