All Shook Up

After all the recent sturm und feedback comparing the violent end of the ‘60s (the Altamont stomping) with the violent end of the ‘90s (the neo-Woodstock burning), it’s refreshing to read an intelligent, unhysterical account of the Rise and Fall of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Empire. “Flowers in the Dustbin” is the latest set of cultural musings by James Miller, whose career has bounced between the Gog of Pop Journalism and the Magog of Academia. A professor of political science at the New School, Miller began his career as a critic in 1967 with the newborn Rolling Stone and wrote until 1991 for a variety of other publications, including the New Republic and Newsweek.

A chronicle of the years 1947 to 1977, from the release of Wynonie Harris’ “Good Rockin’ Tonight” to the death of Elvis Presley, “Flowers in the Dustbin” is an academic sifting of the writings of others--from the criticism of the Greats like critic Greil Marcus to the personal accounts of the Mods like the Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman--filtered through the ear of Miller’s own critical memory. “By breaking apart a familiar and essentially romantic narrative, and exploiting the latest memoirs and research to look again more closely at a handful of events, one can see the story of rock’s global triumph more clearly for what it is: an enduring puzzle that has yet to be properly appreciated, much less explained.”

Although the “global” in “rock’s global triumph” means little more than the “World” in World Series (one won’t find here a consideration of how rock ‘n’ roll did more than Guns ‘n’ Reagan to tumble the Evil Empire), Miller does break apart the familiar narrative in fascinating ways. Yet it is not how Miller connects the dots of the evolution of rock ‘n’ roll that really matters but which dots he chooses to include in the picture. One would expect Elvis, the Beatles, Dylan and the Stones. One would also expect the appearance of some obscure yet arguable Ur-Rocker--and Wynonie Harris fits the bill, also providing Miller with the opportunity to discourse on how the word “rock” was bleached of its sexual origins as neatly as Austin Powers laundered “shag” half a century later.

What is surprising is the importance Miller gives to the camp stream of influence in rock ‘n’ roll, from Little Richard through Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground down to David Bowie and his hermaphroditic incubus Ziggy Stardust and the kitsch tributary of excess that found its violent end in Malcom McLaren’s Sex Pistols. And yet, in examples ranging from “Tutti Frutti” (which Little Richard originally wrote as a liebeslied to a sex act that dare not speak its name) to “Hound Dog” (black slang for gigolo), Miller shows how mainliners like the Beatles and Elvis crossed into these forbidden zones for both material and influence.

Mixture and confusion--sexual, geographical, racial and even intellectual--are key to Miller’s definition of rock ‘n’ roll. “A mongrel music” is how Billboard magazine described Carl Perkins’ “Blue Suede Shoes” when it was released on Jan. 1, 1956. “A melange of vernacular styles,” Miller continues his own description, “the genre combined aspects of jump blues and Tin Pan Alley pop with country and gospel and fiddle hoedowns from long ago and far away.”

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Most important, rock ‘n’ roll contributed to the colorization of the Billboard charts, forever destroying the category of “race” records and creating a new “melange” of a confused aficionado for a music that had previously been the province of African Americans--the White Negro, as Norman Mailer called the fan. “The Twist was a form of therapy for a convalescing nation,” Miller quotes the black revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver as saying in “Soul on Ice.” White people were struggling to reclaim “their Bodies again after generations of alienated and disembodied existence. . . . They were swinging and gyrating and shaking their dead little asses like petrified zombies trying to regain the warmth of life, rekindle the dead limbs, the cold ass, the stone heart, the stiff, mechanical, disused joints with the spark of life.”

Why did this happen? What explains the “mongrelization” of America and its music? As much as he might want to find a logic to this mixture, Miller recognizes that accident more than intention, unbridled passion more than well-harnessed training were responsible for the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll.

“Rock, when it is entertaining, offers the sound of surprise: not the surprise of virtuosos improvising new ways to play (the thrill of jazz), but rather the surprise of untrained amateurs, working within their limits, finding a voice of their own--and sometimes even elaborating new song forms unthinkable to more highly skilled musicians. Without an air of ingenuous freshness and earnest effort, rock as a musical form is generally coarse, even puerile--full of sound and fury, perhaps, but characteristically spurning the subtle creativity and seasoned craftsmanship that is the glory of such other mature vernacular pop music genres as jazz and the blues, country and gospel.”

In other words, Miller is saying, our parents were right--rock ‘n’ roll is a tale told by idiots.

To that extent, Miller is absolutely correct in hailing Elvis as the Nero of rock ‘n’ roll, the mediocre fiddler, the untrained amateur whose handlers recognized the sympathetic mediocrity of the baby boomers and played to it all the way to the bank. When Elvis turned Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Hound Dog” into the biggest-selling record of the ‘50s, Leiber mused on how completely the King was dumbing down America. “You could say this guy is a monumental cosmic success. Maybe what he wanted to do was more important. Maybe Coca-Cola is more important than Eugene O’Neill--maybe in the final countdown of America that’s what’s more important.”

And not just in his music. “Thanks to the mind-boggling mediocrity of almost all of his highly profitable films,” Miller continues, “Elvis Presley not only squandered the best years of his creative life on drivel and kitsch--he also can take credit for accelerating what one historian has aptly called ‘the juvenilization of American movies,’ from ‘Blackboard Jungle’ to ‘Star Wars’ and beyond.”

Mailer and Leiber and Cleaver and George Lucas--”Flowers in the Dustbin” is as wonderfully mixed up as the rock revolution it describes. If Miller’s prose occasionally churns along more in the style of Edward Gibbon than of Greil Marcus (to whom the book is dedicated), it is, even at its most pedestrian, clear and helpful and debatable. Miller reminds us that rock--no matter its deluge of sales--is not a single, mighty river charging through the heartland of the country but a veritable tangle of streams, overlapping, intersecting, born from a delta and destined to pass from this world a delta still.*