Like A Rolling Stone - Greil Marcus

 LIKE A ROLLING STONE - GREIL MARCUS

Greil Marcus drills down into Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone and I'm intrigued, not so much by Dylan or the song itself but by the idea of a whole book being written about a single song. How do you do that? Like A Rolling Stone is six minutes and six seconds long so from the start is double the length of a normal song but how do you wring 258 pages of text from it and that's not including the Acknowledgements and the Index. How do you do that?

Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History Of The 20th Century, where he was the first writer to thoroughly link the Sex Pistols and Situationism, joining all the dots and making a pretty convincing case for it. John Lydon scoffed, of course, and dismissed the very idea that the Sex Pistols had been linked in some way to history and a secret one at that. As did writer Stewart Home scoff but only because Marcus got there first. Marcus was also the editor of Lester Bangs' collection of essays Psychotic Reactions & Carburetor Dung, and if you know anything about Lester Bangs then that in itself should qualify any writer for practically any job.

So yes, if anyone can write a whole book about a single song then it's going to be Greil Marcus though the question remains: How do you do it?

Like A Rolling Stone was first released in 1965 so Marcus sets the scene, describing the world at that time in terms of politics, racial discrimination, civil rights, riots, Vietnam and so on; as well as highlighting other records populating the same musical landscape such as Petula Clark's Downtown, Sam Cooke's A Change Is Gonna Come, and the Supremes' Stop! In The Name Of Love. Of course, it's always been relatively easy to chart the Western world by songs and 1965 was no exception, it being a year of iconic releases including the Righteous Brothers' You've Lost That Loving Feeling, the Rolling Stones' (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and interestingly the Byrds' version of Dylan's Mr Tambourine Man that actually reached number one in the Charts, something that Dylan has never done himself.

Marcus then maps out how Dylan was being perceived at that time and how he will probably always be perceived right up to the point when his obituary is one day written, that being as a 'protest singer'. Brought about primarily by his recording of Blowin' In The Wind, it's a perception that Dylan was never really happy about. When asked for his political opinions, Dylan would feign outrage: "I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go through this kind of thing. Does Smokey Robinson have to answer these questions?", implying that it was ridiculous to ask mere pop singers about the state of the world, and of course, he was right.

The problem, however, was that Dylan wasn't just a 'mere pop singer' but was instead something more akin to a conduit, a marker - a key figure within the zeitgeist who just happened to have the insight, the foresight and the talent at the right time and the right place. Dylan fulfilled a role - as did the audience - though he complicated things by also having the wherewithal to break expectations and subsequently confuse the audience, him being called 'Judas' for going electric being a case in point.

According to critic Robert Ray, the sound of Bob Dylan's voice changed more people's ideas about the world than his political message did and it's this that Marcus riffs on and when it comes to describing Like A Rolling Stone, going into metaphor overdrive on the sound and the feel of the song.

'As a sound the record is like a cave,' he writes 'where light flickers off the walls in patterns that seem almost in rhythm'. It 'stays in the air, its challenge to itself to stay up for six full minutes, never looking down.'

He describes the verses as Dylan chasing the person to whom the song is directed and harrying her before the chorus vaults him in front of her and as she flees him he appears before her, pointing and shouting "How does it feel? How does it feel?" And then suddenly it's no longer just the girl in the song being addressed but the listener of the song

But what is the song actually about? What is the actual meaning of Like A Rolling Stone? According to Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone magazine it's about growing up and discovering what's going on around you, realising that life isn't all you've been told. And then there's the Jimi Hendrix version as performed at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 where Hendrix famously lit his guitar on fire and prayed to it, a version that writer David Henderson described as being about Hendrix's own life and the desperately winding path he has travelled before ending up at Monterey and his crowning glory.

Herein, however, lies a problem with Marcus's book because after 258 pages of convoluted prose he fails to pin down a definitive meaning to the song. We can only presume this is intentional, suggesting there are actually multiple meanings to it though it makes you wonder what was Dylan's meaning? There are two answers to this, the first being that the meaning is very simple, black and white, and uncomplicated. The second being that Dylan himself distorted any meaning when composing it which has consequently led to further distortion from practically every single, individual listener of the song. It's a mark of greatness, of course, when a song talks to people and is interpreted personally, which is why a lot of song writers decline to explain their songs or even have their lyrics printed so as not to pin them down like so many dead butterflies.

Myself, I always thought Like A Rolling Stone was about Edie Sedgwick - Andy Warhol's muse and one of his Factory superstars - and the time when Dylan was in a relationship with her. It fits the timeline as in the period they were seeing each other, their split, and the release of the song. The words fit as well where the Miss Lonely character in the song is Sedgwick and the Diplomat is Warhol and in these terms the song makes total sense, particularly when you know that Dylan didn't think very highly of Warhol. The strange thing is that Marcus mentions Sedgwick only once in the whole book and so fleetingly that her name isn't even included in the Index. 

So this, it would appear, is how you write a book about a single song: Process, setting, descriptive prose, metaphors, high praise, smoke, mirrors, a wink, a nudge and far too many words to the wise when a brief explanation would suffice.

John Serpico

In Search Of The Lost Chord - 1967 And The Hippie Idea - Danny Goldberg

 IN SEARCH OF THE LOST CHORD -

1967 AND THE HIPPIE IDEA -

DANNY GOLDBERG

In one of the first ever interviews with the Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten famously declared "I hate hippies and all they stand for." At this, music journalist and first division Punk inner circle member Caroline Coon rebuked Rotten for the tabloid journalism manner in which he was denigrating hippie idealism, warning him that "the gutter press did to hippies what they're going to do to you." She was right. What was at first deemed to be some sort of threat - as in Punk as an attitude and a state of mind - was very quickly recuperated and reduced to a style of clothes, a sequence of chords, a set of restrictions and a meaningless sneer. Distorted to cartoon level, a burnt-out memory of how it might have been, bought up, souped-up, sold out and served up as just another cheap product for the consumer's head.

Punk, however, was for a brief moment so much more than that, kicking open not only doors that had always remained tightly locked but also windows, emergency exits, cat flaps and any other sort of entrance to another world historically slammed shut upon the unwashed, the unwelcome and the unwanted. 

"If you want to understand the Sixties, you need to understand the Fifties," Timothy Leary once said, and it was good advice. Likewise, if you want to understand the Seventies, you need to understand the Sixties and ad infinitum with the Eighties, Nineties, Noughties, etc. The Sixties and the hippie idea didn't just come from nowhere and likewise with the Seventies and Punk.

The 'lost chord' of which Danny Goldberg writes in his book In Search Of The Lost Chord is the collection of energies that in 1967 harmonized and created a single feeling that briefly but deeply penetrated into the hearts and minds of those who could hear it. An ephemeral collective vibe that permeated the culture at that time. Those energies were myriad and diverse, emanating from the influence of psychedelics, rebellion, demands for civil rights, calls for peace, radical therapy, music, fashion, political critique and so and so forth.

According to Joe Boyd, one of the founders of the legendary UFO club in London, the Sixties peaked in 1967 and there's some across the board agreement with this, not least from Allen Ginsberg who said the Be-In in San Francisco in '67 was "the last purely idealistic hippie event". It's an idea shored-up further by the funeral procession held in Haight Ashbury that same year proclaiming the death of 'Hippie'.

"A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah," said the then governor of California Ronald Reagan but what did he know and what was he doing anyway attempting to mock those who were only asking that peace be given a chance whilst children burned to death from American napalm in Vietnam? As John Lennon later asked: "What in the world are you thinking of, laughing in the face of love?"

The problem with Goldberg's book is that in a way it's too polite, that Goldberg is a bit too nice about things. Through rose-tinted glasses he differentiates between the actual hippie idea and the distorted cartoon version of it but the actual version he proffers is so fragmented that it's almost incoherent. A vast chunk of the book is him joining the many dots so as to create a lineage, like mapping out the stars in the heavens to form constellations. If you look closely, you can just make out the Plough, Ursa Major and Orion though you really need to squint. To put it another way, it's like counting the pieces of a jigsaw to see if they're all there without actually making the jigsaw.

"I can't see this lasting because the media are going to get here and pretty soon (Haight Ashbury) will turn into Rip Off Street," said Paul McCartney whilst on a visit to San Francisco in 1967 and there's an unspoken consensus on this it seems. To such an extent, in fact, that it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. In San Francisco, coffee shops start selling 'love burgers' and tourist buses start including hippies as a highlight for sightseers - "Look! There's one!" In Amsterdam, people begin stealing and repainting the white bicycles. The term 'spiritual materialism' comes into play where pursuits of spirituality are turned into ego trips where supposed spiritual credentials are flaunted - rather like proto-versions of Russell Brand.

In London at the Roundhouse, a conference is held attended by the likes of RD Laing, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg. Founder of the San Francisco Diggers, Emmett Grogan is there too and delivers a fiery speech that receives a standing ovation, only for him to reveal the words had been an English translation of a speech Adolf Hitler had given to the Reichstag in 1937. The point Grogan making being to sensitize the audience to the moral emptiness of what in some quarters was being passed for revolutionary rhetoric.

The soul of hippiedom was a battleground where different warring factions were fighting it out for the upper hand and dominative representation. Some armed with flowers, some armed with guns. Some armed with hallucinogenic drugs and the Bhagavad Gita, some armed with the dollar and the power and influence of mainstream mass media - heralded by their attack dogs, the gutter press, as Caroline Coon later put it.

This is the nub of In Search Of The Lost Chord and what Danny Goldberg in a roundabout way identifies. It's easy to say, of course, that money won out but that's the narrative directed by the mainstream and as the mainstream is always conservative - enforced and maintained to preserve the status quo - it's only actually one side of the story. Danny Goldberg's 'lost chord' is another side. A single note buried in the symphony. A single flame flickering in blazing sunlight. A notion, an idea. An idea that's worth reading about, worth thinking about and worth preserving.

John Serpico