Nadja - Andre Breton

 NADJA - ANDRE BRETON

Andre Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement and he of the famous credo 'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all' as declared in his novel Nadja. You only live once apparently so why not have a read of it whilst here? In for a penny in for a pound, as they say. Half-way through, however, and I'm thinking 'Hang on a minute, this is near-unreadable, a near-incomprehensible exercise in tortured English' though inadvertently it's also an insight into the way Breton's mind works. It's all over the place and not particularly pretty. Scant attention is paid to such things as 'Does any of this make any sense?' or 'Is this the way to compose a sentence?' and is instead a kind of literary free-form jazz.

'How can I make myself understood?' Breton asks. Well, by trying to not be deliberately misunderstood would be a start and I say that with some qualification as someone who has read James Joyce, William Burroughs and Kathy Acker - writers who are not particularly renowned for being 'easy'. Writers who could be said to have committed crimes against the English language but in doing so still conveyed meaning and brilliance. I speak as someone who has read Paul Auster whose writing can be so boring as to test the patience of the most determined of readers. Not that I'm saying Nadja is boring or even experimental, it's just that it's so willfully obtuse to the point of being impenetrable. 

From what I can gather the book is autobiographical and is about a writer (Breton) meeting a young girl (called Nadja) in Paris and becoming besotted with her. What is unclear is the nature of the relationship between the two and whether the girl is just out to make a bit of money from the writer by her playing up to his expectations and desires, or is it the writer seducing the girl for his own ends through his artistic credentials and the money in his wallet?

It doesn't much matter in the end because during the course of their relationship they both come across as being just as pretentious as each other. It's telling, however, that in the end the girl vanishes and having been told by his friends 'She's mad, you know' the writer thinks maybe she's been committed to an asylum but he's too scared to investigate further, so writes a book instead: Nadja.

'There is no use being alive if one must work,' Breton writes and therein is the pivot on which Breton's elitism and privilege turns, adopting a position of splendid isolation where he freely ponders and pontificates to his heart's content without having to worry about if anything makes sense because to him the senselessness is the sense. Hence the notion of 'petrifying coincidence' and Surrealist thought. Everything, including the lives of others and such notions as 'communication' is rendered therefore as just so much grist to the mill. The problem being, unfortunately, that there is nothing tangible in the end to hold onto and all his words are nothing but grains of sand falling through fingers.

John Serpico

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer

 EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE - JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER

Nobody talks of 9/11 these days. It's never mentioned. Not that it should be on the tip of everyone's tongue of course but it's just funny how an event of such magnitude, of such historic, global impact has now practically faded from memory, only remembered on its anniversary and then only by a now limited number of people. Do people still remember where they were at the time in the same way as in when John F Kennedy died? John who? 9/11 changed everything, so it's said. It was Tony Blair's finest moment even, with his 'the kaleidoscope has been shaken' speech though it was also all downhill for him from there on.

I was in New York shortly after 9/11 and obviously I went along to Ground Zero just to see it with my own eyes. We'd all seen the pictures, we'd all seen the footage but it was only when face to face with it did I truly recognize and understand the sheer, immense scale of it. New York is impressive anyway, where the streets are like canyons but for there to be a devastated hole where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood was mind-boggling. It was like looking upon something that shouldn't be, that wasn't possible - but there it was. And that was the paradox: it was a sight to behold because there was nothing there - there was nothing there, which made it a sight to behold. On trying to comprehend what was essentially the incomprehensible it suddenly dawned on me that I'd never actually considered the noise that the towers collapsing would have made. How loud exactly was that noise? Was it a boom, was it a rumble, and how long did it last?

Millions upon millions of words have been written about 9/11 but Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close was one of the first to write about it in novel form and at the time it was a pretty brave thing to do. It was an obvious subject to write about but to Americans at least it was still a raw and emotive subject. On the other hand, perhaps the only way to come to terms with reality is to turn it into fiction? Who knows?

Foer's book is a novel but at the same time it's more than that. It's bricolage. It's a scrapbook of differing styles of writing, of photographs, design and experimentation. It's wordplay. It's a mean feat. A quite astonishing accomplishment in its own way. It's all about a nine-year old boy by the name of Oskar who has lost his father in 9/11, 'lost' being the relevant word because like so many others his body was never found. Though it's never explicitly stated, Oskar has autism so is somewhat different from all other children and indeed somewhat different from all other people. He's a precocious genius, at odds with everything and against the grain. Already finding it hard if not near impossible to function 'normally' in the world, 9/11 and the death of his father compounds it further.

Is Oskar a metaphor for America? Probably not but it's an interesting notion. Could not America's reaction to 9/11 as in lashing out at Afghanistan - bombing an already primitive country back to the Stone Age - be construed as the illogical/logical action of an autistic child? Those scenes of President Bush at the bomb site wreckage of Ground Zero, posing there for the cameras with an idiot grin on his face as Rescue Workers around him chanted 'USA! USA!' like at a ball game. Is that the actions of responsible adults? Posing for the cameras on top of what in effect was a mass graveyard?

Until someone is diagnosed as such, would they even know they might be autistic? And when someone is diagnosed as having autism does it come somewhat as a relief because it's an explanation as to why they always felt there was something not quite right with them? Did Jonathan Safran Foer know he was writing about a child with autism or was he writing about a character who he viewed as simply being an idiot savant - a precocious child genius? Does Foer have autism himself, I wonder? Do all Americans? Did they once know but have now forgotten? Just as they now seem to have forgotten about 9/11? The United States of Amnesia. The United States of Autism. Who knows?

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is all about searching for clues and searching for answers. Oskar spends all his time making sense of the world by using the most elaborate means and when his Dad is killed it tips him over into doubling down on that sense making. When he finds an old key that had belonged to his father he assumes that whatever it unlocks will hold all the answers he's searching for so he sets off on a quest through the six boroughs of New York, which seeing as there are only actually five boroughs introduces a sense of magic realism into the story. It's a thankless task, with Oskar encountering all manner of New Yorkers each with their own stories going on.

I wouldn't want to make light of 9/11 because a lot of people died that day and with the war on Afghanistan, a lot more people died later. Making light of it is, however, a criticism that could be levelled at Foer's book due to him being overly sentimental and cloying at the heart strings to such an extent that it ends up being annoying and rather than feeling sorry for the Oskar character, you end up almost disliking him.

Is it mere coincidence that Oskar shares the same name as the child protagonist in Gunter Grass's classic novel The Tin Drum? Probably not though whether it's intentional or a subliminal influence is something only Foer would know. At the end of the book, is the use of the series of photos of 'The Falling Man' (the person captured on camera as he fell from the Twin Towers) that when the pages are quickly flicked over make him appear to be floating upwards a nod to the Russian war film Come And See where at the end footage is played backwards and in so doing reverses World War Two? Probably, but again only Foer would know.

Does Oskar find any answers in the end? Well, not exactly. He finds out what the key is for but it's of no personal use to him but in the process and as a result of his quest he ends up finding himself. Which is probably a lot more that can be said about America.

John Serpico

French Revolution 1968 - Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville

 FRENCH REVOLUTION 1968 -

PATRICK SEALE & MAUREEN McCONVILLE

If this was France everything would be on fire. And there's the nub of it. Why is England not on fire? Why is England in a near-state of lethargy when it comes to questions of social change? Why do its peoples allow themselves to be plunged head-long into yet another round of austerity when their country is meant to be one of the richest in the world? Why is everything so quiet and subdued? Why is there no foment on the streets? Why is there no sign of anything approaching anywhere near the events of May 1968 in France that caused riots in the streets, barricades to be erected, the near fall of the Government and the near ushering in of a new age? Why? Why? And why again.

French Revolution 1968, written by Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville is the story of the events around May '68 in France, written as they unfolded. Books age, especially if they're written of and about their time. History is always in the making, history is recorded and history moves on leaving only scholars and the likes of us to pore over its bones.

'The quite extraordinary feature of the May Revolution in Paris,' the authors note 'was the extreme youth of the rebel troops. If most of the general staff were over twenty, much of the infantry came from school.' And therein is one of the biggest lessons to be learned: those who have the most to gain are those who have the least to lose, and students at that time having no investment in the system and no sign of a future had a whole world to gain which explains why their discontent and their demands went well beyond the life they led within the walls of their universities. 

"No future!" proclaimed the Sex Pistols nine years later and you can bet any money this was a slogan that Malcolm McLaren came up with rather than Lydon as McLaren would have had a better understanding of how to cajole a crowd into action having been in Paris in '68. Not that McLaren was any kind of seasoned street activist or anything it's just that he probably had a better understanding of how culture works in a kind of reverse psychology way, particularly in comparison to someone like Penny Rimbaud of Crass who would say the Pistols' 'no future' was "a challenge to our creativity", suggesting a lack of understanding on his part. But I digress.

The parents of all these newly politicised students knew nothing about what was going on until it was too late. It was almost as though that within every respectable middle class family there was a Fifth Columnist. So too with the established political parties of both the Left and Right, little did they know that young people everywhere were coming to the view that their parents' world was due for some pretty violent political surgery.

In as much as Daniel Cohn-Bendit is rightly highlighted as playing an important part in triggering off the revolutionary avalanche of May '68, it's always wrong to place too much emphasis on any one individual in regards to such events as they're often turned into heroes of sorts and heroes always in the end tend to disappoint. If there is in fact any one thing that can be pointed at as being the trigger for the '68 Revolution and the actual rioting in the streets then it's the police moving in on the university of Sorbonne to eject students who were occupying it. At the sight of a great mass of armed police arresting a mass of peacefully protesting students, the mass of student on-lookers took exception and jeered and shouted at the police. All it took was for a stone to be thrown at the police for another to follow. All it took was for a gas grenade to be thrown at the students followed by another for the situation to escalate out of control.

'The authorities had blundered badly by penetrating the Sorbonne, and taking into custody scores of young people whose only offence had been to make a little noise. They had then compounded the error by parading their prisoners in front of their comrades. As was so often to happen, repression bred violence rather than stifling it. The immediate effect of the authorities' crude display of strength was to unite the mass of uncommitted students - and their teachers - behind the enrages. In a few minutes a mass movement was created. It was war. The Revolution had begun.'

To provoke a riot is a pretty difficult thing to do as any erstwhile, would-be black bloc anarchist might attest though paradoxically it can take only a tiny incident such as a stone being thrown for things to escalate beyond all expectations. Arguably, most riots are instigated by the police through something they have done such as the killing of someone (be it in custody or not) or through attacking a crowd, causing that crowd to hit back. There can be all the necessary ingredients in place to form a breeding ground for a riot such as a government bearing down unacceptably upon its populace, or economic turmoil, repression, discrimination and so on but if there isn't the spark then depression will prevail and the over-riding state will remain moribund. The key then is for there to be a riot situation for that spark to be lit and that can only occur in no other place but the street. Not on the television, not on the Internet, not on social media. In the street.

'To the observer, one of the puzzles of the May Revolution is that, from the first day of serious fighting, it was hard to establish at whose door responsibility should be laid: was it the heavy hand of the police which lit the fuse, or was it, perhaps, the deliberate courting of repression by small groups of hard-headed revolutionary tacticians?' This question at the end of the day is one of the most important as to understand it leads to understanding where power lies, particularly in regards to who has the power to prevent a riot from happening and who has the power to start one.

From riot to insurrection, as they say, and this is exactly what happened in France, starting from the students rioting and the throwing up of barricades in the streets to the reaching out for support from the unions and the workers in the factories and - to the consternation of the Gaullist government - receiving it.

On the taking over and the occupation of the universities, workers throughout France took note and in solidarity did likewise; downing their tools, taking strike action and occupying their own places of work. This was all done, however, very spontaneously and mostly at base level without the actions being urged or carried forward by the union leadership.

Coming in for criticism during the whole May '68 crisis and deservedly so is the Communist Party of France and the Communist-led CGT trade union federation who when it came to choosing sides between the revolutionaries on the Left and the Gaullist establishment, chose to go with the latter. Their reasoning was that the students and the militants were adventurists and that as Communists they shouldn't jeopardise their hard-gained, supposed semi- respectability by being stampeded into insurrection. Much rather they would in alliance with the non-Communist Left make a bid for political power but acting strictly within the framework of Republican legality. No, not for them the overthrow of capitalism but just a larger slice of the pie.

Much to his credit as a skilled political animal, in what was like a giant game of poker President de Gaulle played his hand, just at the point when his government seemed about to fall. 'In the present circumstances I will not withdraw.' he declared 'I have a mandate from the people. I will fulfil it.' Now where has this been heard before, this talk of mandates - and only recently? The British Conservative Party, of course, and their interchanging Prime Ministers and their clinging to of power.

De Gaulle rallied his troops, calling on all sections of his State apparatus and every tricoloured-blooded Right-wing leaning citizen of France to stand firm against the Communist hordes and their 'totalitarian enterprise'. No matter that the actual Communist Party had denounced the students and their uprising, no matter that they had denounced Cohn-Bendit, no matter that they had done their utmost to present themselves as respectable politicos with no intention of pulling down the State in fact the complete opposite - to the maintaining of the State - the Communist Party and the CGT union and indeed anyone to the Left of politics were all tarred with the same brush and cast as enemies of the State and subsequently enemies of the people.

It was an exceptional display of politics with de Gaulle's words serving to unite every French conservative under the sun whilst at the same time causing disunity on the side of the revolutionaries. Cut off at the pass. Ambushed and kiboshed by offers of higher wages and shorter working hours. The Revolution stumbled before falling flat on its own dreams then given a good kicking whilst on the ground. The Revolution was dead.

To this day it's always asked when and where did a revolutionary, anarchistic society ever successfully exist? The answers trotted out are always Spain in '36, Ukraine in '18, and so on. To this I would add Paris in May of 1968 - if only for a few short weeks. It was there and then that the peoples of Paris became truly alive; without petrol, without public transport, without monies to spend on commodities, with food rationed - though all alleviated through mutual aid to ensure no-one went without and no-one went hungry. With only themselves and each other. When the pomp of officialdom and the social pressures of bourgeois-dictated society were done away with. When the first full-scale challenge in a Western state to the inhuman efficiency of modern industrial life was launched.

It didn't last, as we know. The flame was snuffed out and the red and black flags were replaced by the tricolour, and the Internationale replaced by the Marseillaise. The example, however, had been set. The imagination and the spirit fired. The gauntlet had been thrown down for others to follow with lessons taught and left to be learned for the next time. And it's inevitable. There will be a next time. There's no question about it. When the mode of the music changes, the walls of the city shake and the key is in not being afraid of ruins because before they leave the stage of history the bourgeoise are blasting and ruining the world anyway so what have you got to lose? There isn't really any other option.

John Serpico

The Forest of Dean Miners' Riot of 1831 - Chris Fisher

 THE FOREST OF DEAN MINERS' RIOT OF 1831 -

CHRIS FISHER

No historian I and no academic either. Me? I left school at age 16 and never went to University. Not that I claim this as a virtue or that I plead ignorance as I'm actually pretty well read, if I might say so myself. 'Libraries gave us power' as the Manic Street Preachers once sang and it's a truism that working people have always been great readers and subsequently self-educators. Autodidacts, in other words.

'We will bargain but we won't beg' as RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch recently said in regard to the train strikes and in a similar fashion working people won't be denied what is theirs, meaning when it comes to education if they're not given a decent one then they will educate themselves. Likewise with their history, as in they won't live their lives between the parameters of what others have set, nor will they be defined by the accumulation and interpretation of past lives and events that have nothing to do with them. Working people will have their own history and they will not only read of it on their own terms but will also write it, which rather neatly brings us to the Bristol Radical History Group and their series of books, number 50 being The Forest Of Dean Miners' Strike Of 1831 by Chris Fisher.

In June of 1831, the free miners and commoners of the Forest of Dean rioted and according to the scant accounts available the rioters were 'silly, deluded, mistaken and misled'. Those accounts, however, were written by newspaper correspondents and magistrates so hardly indicative of an unbiased appraisal. Unless there is an on-the-spot reporter to witness such events, to this day and even more so back then, information is always supplied by the police or officialdom so it's always one-sided. This is how 'official' history is written and recorded but as with everything there are always two sides to every story.

Fisher tells us of a stand-off between the miners of the Forest led by a miner called Warren James and the Forest resident officers of the Crown led by the Deputy Surveyor of the Forest and magistrate Edward Machen. For years whole sections of the Forest had been locked up behind gates and fences and claimed as Crown property but come the summer of 1831 these enclosures were challenged and started to be destroyed, with Warren James posting notices around the Forest announcing the opening up of the enclosures and the right of common ownership.

On meeting with Warren James, Machen demanded to know under what authority would the miners open up the Forest? James declined to engage with Machen and instead produced an enormous pick-axe and along with 80 other miners began to break down the fences. This was the only voucher of privilege James and his fellow miners required and in the British history of those governed and governed-by it was a decisive and historic moment.

Machen read the Riot Act but was studiously ignored as the miners set about - in a very peaceful and methodical manner, it must be said - pulling down the fences. Humiliated, Machen had no other option but to leave, abandoning the Forest to the so-called 'mob' who as word spread was quickly joined by others in the liberation. Machen returned the next day with a makeshift group of soldiers only to be met by jeers and derision. Popular support for the opening up of the Forest was evident so once again Machen beat a retreat only to return again two days later with a much more considerable force of men in the form of a squadron of heavily armed Dragoons accompanied by 'every magistrate and gentleman of influence in the neighbourhood'. Under threat of massive violence, this time it was the turn of the miners and commoners to flee with Warren James being arrested and though spared the death penalty, being transported for life to Tasmania as a lesson and warning to others.

All in all it's a little known but interesting story that is actually an echo of other events throughout British history, even of the most recent kind. It's remindful, for example, of the 1980 St Paul's riot in Bristol where that area of the city was abandoned by the police after them being chased out by the mob, only for the police to return in much greater force to take it back. It's remindful of the 1985 so-called Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge where police used massive violence against ordinary men, women and children in a bid to prevent that year's free festival taking place. Even more recently, it's remindful of the 2021 Kill The Bill occupations and protests outside of Bristol's Bridewell Police Station and on Bristol's College Green where police violently ejected protestors, leading to excessive jail sentences for riot. There's an obvious pattern here.

My only criticism of Chris Fisher's book - though it's more of an observation, really - is in regard to when and how a riot is defined as such? As Fisher points out, 'the rioters worked in an orderly and disciplined manner' and 'offered no personal violence and indeed confined themselves wholly to the destruction of the fences', working 'in the same way as they would have worked at anything else'. So what, why, how and by whom was it defined and declared as a riot? The answer is by the magistrate Edward Machen through his reading out of the Riot Act, done so in a bid to disperse the miners.

Likewise in regard to the St Paul's riot of 1980, known and classed as a riot though if you were to ask the actual residents of St Paul's they would tell you it wasn't a riot but an uprising. The Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 on the other hand wasn't actually a battle in the slightest - it was a police riot though it's never called out as such. And then the Kill The Bill protests of 2021 in Bristol where those arrested are still being charged with 'Riot' and being handed lengthy prison sentences. Was it a riot or a protest and when does one become another anyway?  In this instance it would have been the police who arrested people under the Public Order Act but then charged them with 'Riot' but unlike magistrate Edward Machen they didn't at the time read out the Riot Act. So, protesters were arrested on one thing and then charged on another all on the whim of the police, their decision being more than likely influenced and informed by political pressure with the sentences meted out serving as lessons and warnings to others - just like Warren James being transported for life to Tasmania.

History it would seem repeats itself. And those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

John Serpico

Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland

 HEY NOSTRADAMUS! - DOUGLAS COUPLAND

I saw Douglas Coupland years ago at a book launch and found him reassuringly weird, like a cross between Talking Heads' David Byrne and Hannibal Lector. He was also unexpectedly witty, charming and self-effacing. Rather than simply talking about his latest book and reading extracts from it he instead conducted an interview with himself, answering a series of questions he thought it might be interesting to ask of himself. He was a funny guy. Very stiff, very composed, very paranoid.

An interesting thing about Coupland and indeed an almost unusual thing about him as a writer is how steeped he is in modern day pop culture, evidenced for example in the way he has used a Smiths song title - Girlfriend In A Coma - as a title for one of his books and even this one - Hey Nostradamus! - which is an echo of The Fall song Hey Luciani. However, whilst The Fall song concerns itself with the death of Pope John Paul I, Coupland's book is about a high school shooting.

It's divided into four parts, each part being voiced by a different narrator and by the time you're half-way into the first, you've realised just how good a book this is as it dawns upon you that the narrator is actually dead, a victim of the shooting. Weaving between the tale of her secret Las Vegas wedding at aged seventeen, her school life, and a description of the massacre, the narrator questions the point of there being a God if such events happen and so catapults the story into a whole other sphere. It's brilliantly done, with an honesty and deftness of touch that is rare.

The second narrator is the husband of the first, talking from the vantage point of being a widower and expressing himself in the form of a letter addressed to the children of his dead brother's wife. Not only does he describe what he witnessed on the day of the shooting and the trauma of cradling his dead wife's bloodied body but also the background to his relationship with her, his relationship with his religiously fanatical father and in the weeks following the massacre how he himself was suspected of being the mastermind behind it, fuelled by gossip and insinuation from the bible study group his wife once belonged to. It's not a pretty picture and religion doesn't come out of it well at all. There is also a totally unexpected twist to the narration when he reveals the children of his dead brother to whom he's addressing his letter are actually his.

The third narrator is the new partner of the second narrator whom he's ended up in a relationship with a few years after the massacre has taken place. She's also going through personal trauma as her partner has suddenly gone missing, believed to be dead. It's made the news because of who he is - the husband of one of the high school shooting victims who at one point had been suspected of masterminding the whole thing. It's a convoluted story involving loneliness, analogues and psychic messages but it makes sense, and it works.

The fourth and final narrator is the aforementioned religiously fanatical father who addresses his missing son in the form of a letter to him which he nails copies of to trees - like Luther nailing his 95 Theses to the doors of a church - in the hope a copy might one day be read by him when Sasquatch-like he emerges from hiding in the woods. Of all the narrators, and what with him being supposedly the closest to God, the father is the loneliest, the most wretched and the most desperate. God, as Douglas Coupland seems to be confirming, is merely a concept by which we measure our pain.

Ultimately, Hey Nostradamus! is about loss in a godless world. It's a riff on the modern age where randomness and atomisation are the grist to the mill and trying to make sense of the senselessness is akin to a ticking timebomb that mostly fizzles out in a sad, silent whimper but that sometimes explodes in wanton and inexplicable violence whose ripples course through society leaving some slightly wet and others drowned. Hey Nostradamus! is a worthwhile read and though it doesn't offer any answers and nor does it pretend or even attempt to, it poses plenty of questions.

John Serpico

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