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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This was the mood when we first looked into Rock Dreams, and the recognitions that occurred were incredible, in some cases unbearable, the shock and pleasure and unashamed loss we felt when we realized that for most of our lives we'd all been having the same dream.
Rock and roll, the great subject, and rock and roll history, just like any other history, coming down in a million versions and two basic enduring modes, public and private (a.k.a. secret, socalled) or outer-inner, just like always, just like brothers falling out over their inheritance who contrive to meet again and behave like brothers only inside of dreams and visions, where it all gets cleaned up; as it does in those extraordinary dreams you sometimes have where you've died, and the Witness peels away from your body and does all your looking for you. You can't be frightened or seduced or disappointed anymore, anything can be said, everything can be shown. When the old days and the days to come are in sympathy, you don't need your memory to lie to you and make all its partisan re-arrangements of time, place, people, and feelings, you don't have to suffer again over what "really" happened and what "never" happened. You don't have to think or choose or act, you don't even have to buy anything. All you have to do is look.
The show business of rock and roll is taken for granted in Rock Dreams, and is at the heart of every piece. The devotional aspect of rock and roll is taken for granted, too, and is also at the heart of every piece, which doesn't mean that rock and roll has two hearts, or that Rock Dreams does. Even though it's a collaboration, it's a particularly single-hearted one, with a shared view, a common purpose and, I think, a mutual motive, which was to put something of equal value back into rock and roll for all that had been given. As a great work about rock and roll, Rock Dreams is rare enough. As an expression of fan love and an act of cultural ecology, it's inimitable.
The book's boundaries are chillingly specific, but the resonances are incalculable. It begins and ends with images of the accidental father of rock and roll who hates rock and roll: The Frank Sinatra That is Coming, so soft and fresh with the dew of his early morning that he has to be restrained by embraces from jumping into the fire; and The Frank Sinatra Who is Passing, thirty years older and hard (having gone, as we know, through the fire and the ice and the everything-nice), isolated in the dead of Las Vegas night, absorbing what little light is left and raising his glass to a ghost audience in a gesture past exhaustion and beyond farewell, while underneath run the words of the old anthemic teenage prayer for early death and a good-looking corpse, "Hope I die before I get old." Anybody ever thirty-five can have either Frank Sinatra, both versions-in-time. He's been public for more than forty years now, we can have him practically any way we want him, including and especially not at all.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
This was the mood when we first looked into Rock Dreams, and the recognitions that occurred were incredible, in some cases unbearable, the shock and pleasure and unashamed loss we felt when we realized that for most of our lives we'd all been having the same dream.
Rock and roll, the great subject, and rock and roll history, just like any other history, coming down in a million versions and two basic enduring modes, public and private (a.k.a. secret, socalled) or outer-inner, just like always, just like brothers falling out over their inheritance who contrive to meet again and behave like brothers only inside of dreams and visions, where it all gets cleaned up; as it does in those extraordinary dreams you sometimes have where you've died, and the Witness peels away from your body and does all your looking for you. You can't be frightened or seduced or disappointed anymore, anything can be said, everything can be shown. When the old days and the days to come are in sympathy, you don't need your memory to lie to you and make all its partisan re-arrangements of time, place, people, and feelings, you don't have to suffer again over what "really" happened and what "never" happened. You don't have to think or choose or act, you don't even have to buy anything. All you have to do is look.
The show business of rock and roll is taken for granted in Rock Dreams, and is at the heart of every piece. The devotional aspect of rock and roll is taken for granted, too, and is also at the heart of every piece, which doesn't mean that rock and roll has two hearts, or that Rock Dreams does. Even though it's a collaboration, it's a particularly single-hearted one, with a shared view, a common purpose and, I think, a mutual motive, which was to put something of equal value back into rock and roll for all that had been given. As a great work about rock and roll, Rock Dreams is rare enough. As an expression of fan love and an act of cultural ecology, it's inimitable.
The book's boundaries are chillingly specific, but the resonances are incalculable. It begins and ends with images of the accidental father of rock and roll who hates rock and roll: The Frank Sinatra That is Coming, so soft and fresh with the dew of his early morning that he has to be restrained by embraces from jumping into the fire; and The Frank Sinatra Who is Passing, thirty years older and hard (having gone, as we know, through the fire and the ice and the everything-nice), isolated in the dead of Las Vegas night, absorbing what little light is left and raising his glass to a ghost audience in a gesture past exhaustion and beyond farewell, while underneath run the words of the old anthemic teenage prayer for early death and a good-looking corpse, "Hope I die before I get old." Anybody ever thirty-five can have either Frank Sinatra, both versions-in-time. He's been public for more than forty years now, we can have him practically any way we want him, including and especially not at all.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Bill Haley. People ask me, Bill, how can you do this? You a musician, a grown man and a pro, how can you play this trash? This jungle music? Listen, I tell them, don’t knock it. I mean, I’m thirty years old, and I have a wife and five children to support, and I scuffled ten years for a break, and now I finally got it, and I’m not about to let it go, not for anyone, no matter what. So I grin, and I keep on grinning, and I don’t stop grinning until they turn the lights out. Listen, I say, it’s a living.