Lipstick Traces (9 page)

They used rock ’n’ roll as a weapon against itself. With all instruments but guitar, bass, drums, and voice written off as effete, as elitist accoutrements of a professionalist cult of technique, it was a music best suited to anger and frustration, focusing chaos, dramatizing the last days as everyday life, ramming all emotions into the narrow gap between a blank stare and a sardonic grin. The guitarist laid down a line of fire to cover the singer, the rhythm section put both in a pressure drop, and as a response to what was suddenly perceived as the totalitarian freeze of the modern world the music could seem like a version of it. It was also something new under the sun: a new sound.

It’s the oldest hype in the book—and the page that can’t be footnoted. After thirty years of rock ’n’ roll there are plenty of footnotes: collectors’ albums that allow a listener to go back in time, enter the studio that no longer exists, and hear the new sound as it was discovered, flubbed, or even denied. It is a displacing experience.

In Chicago in 1957, trying to cut “Little Village,” bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson and his white producer get into an argument over just what, exactly, constitutes a village—an argument resolved only when Williamson shouts, “Little
village,
motherfucker! You name it after yo’ mammy if you like!” As a footnote, this explains why Williamson proceeds to take up much of the song with a discussion of what distinguishes a village from a hamlet, a town, or a city; it also explains a great deal about the evolution of the master-slave relationship. In Memphis in 1954, guitarist Scotty Moore responds to a slow, sensual early take of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by calling nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley a nigger; three years later in the same spot, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips engage in an hysterical donnybrook over the question of rock ’n’ roll as music of salvation or damnation. These moments explain most of American culture.

In 1959 in New Orleans, Jimmy Clanton, much loathed over the years as a classic example of the white pretty boy who forced authentic black rockers into oblivion, begins “Go, Jimmy, Go,” his most loathsome hit. He pauses: “Bop bop bop ba da da,” he lilts to the control booth. “Am I singing Mickey Mouse enough yet?” “A little bit more!” comes the answer. “Geez, I’m not Frankie Avalon,” says Clanton, just before turning himself into Frankie Avalon. This explains that Clanton’s heart was in the right place.

Again in Chicago in 1957, Chuck Berry is about to make another run at “Johnny B. Goode.” “Take three!” shouts the producer. “Gotta be good!” Berry and his band lean into the tune, but the opening passage—in the version that made the charts, the most deliciously explosive opening in rock ’n’ roll—isn’t there. The structure is there, the chords, the notes, everything one could write down on a lead sheet, but the music is battened by a queer languor, a hesitation, a hedged bet. Then one changes records and listens to
“Johnny B. Goode” as it has been on the radio since 1958: those notes and chords have grown into a fact that throws off all footnotes. They hit.

And one can listen to
The Great Rock
’
n
’
Roll Swindle,
a two-record documentary of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren to prove that the panicky adventures he and the band lived out were part of a plot he had scripted long in advance. The idea this set of footnotes means to get across is that the story of the Sex Pistols—the sudden gulp of social life into the throat of a hunched boy calling himself an antichrist—was from the beginning conceived and delivered as a mere shuck, McLaren’s little joke on the world. If Johnny Rotten really meant it when he railed “We
mean
it, man!” in “God Save the Queen,” then the joke was on him, or on anyone who believed what he said.

It’s a good try. Released in 1979, a year after the Sex Pistols had ceased to be,
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
includes a lumbering “God Save the Queen Symphony” with fey narration, various depressing post–Sex Pistols rave-ups by the then nearly late Sid Vicious, “Anarchy in the U.K.” done in the manner of Michel Legrand and sung entirely in French by one Jerzimy, and a medley of Pistols hits by a happy-feet disco group. Both the French and disco numbers are actually quite appealing: “Pretty Vacant” recast as elevator music is not an uninspired fantasy. But McLaren’s effort to show up the Sex Pistols as a con (the secret at the heart of the secret society turns out to be a shaggy-dog story) is blown up by the inclusion of several real Sex Pistols recordings: “Belsen Was a Gas” from the final performance in San Francisco, a sore-throat alternate take of “Anarchy,” versions of the Who’s “Substitute” and the Monkees’ “Stepping Stone,” and a combination of “Johnny B. Goode” and Jonathan Richman’s “Road Runner.”

The last number sounds like a rehearsal—not a rehearsal for a recording session or a concert, but for the idea of the Sex Pistols itself. You can hear them reaching back for the most primitive rock ’n’ roll voice in order to destroy the smug self-parody rock ’n’ roll had become; at the same time, you can hear them reinventing the music out of whole cloth.

The band heads into “Johnny B. Goode,” but Johnny Rotten doesn’t know, or won’t sing, the words; once past Deep-down-in-Lweezeeanna all he can come up with are squawks, spew, birdcalls. “Ah, fuck, it’s
awful”
he moans, but the musicians charge on and take hold of the song. “I
hate
songs like that,” Rotten announces: “Stop it, stop it! It’s
torture!”
The band won’t stop, so finally he screams them down: “
AAAAAAAAAAAAH
!” They slow the pace. “Is there anything else we can do,” he asks hopelessly—and then up from his synapses comes “Road Runner.” The association is right: both “Johnny B. Goode” and “Road Runner” are elemental rock statements, the former a founding myth, the story of a little country boy who could play a guitar just like ringing a bell, the latter pretty much an account of listening to him, an account of how good it felt.

The band makes the tiny switch to the second song, and Rotten panics. “I don’t know the words,” he says. “I don’t know how it starts, I’ve forgotten it!” There is such weary embarrassment in his voice you’re afraid he’s going to run out of the studio. “Stop it, stop it,” Rotten cries again. A thuggish cynicism is fighting the desperation in his voice and losing, the band hasn’t stopped for a second, and he gives it one more try: “What’s the first line?” And so drummer Paul Cook, courtesy of Jonathan Richman, as the latter wrote at eighteen, in Boston in 1969, calls back: “One, two, three, four, five, six.” That is the first line of “Road Runner.” With the words in his head, Johnny Rotten, not yet Anarchy or Antichrist, just a kid making new culture out of old chords, takes off.

As Richman finally recorded it, “Road Runner” was the most obvious song in the world, and the strangest. He surfaced around 1970, performing as someone you’d never notice if he weren’t standing on a stage making you watch; his themes were traditional (cars, girls, the radio), but with an overlay of moment-to-moment, quotidian realism that made the traditional odd. He sang about standing in line at the bank, falling in love with the teller (or maybe just feeling sorry for her, trying to decide if he’d rather be the teller or the person waiting for her to raise her eyes and not see who she was looking at). He sang about hating hippies, because they wore attitudes like
shades, so complete in their smugness, so complete they never noticed
anything,
because they cut themselves off from everything that was good and alive and wonderful about the modern world.

Richman’s music did not sound quite sane. When I went to see him play in 1972, his band—the Modern Lovers, which is what he’s always called whatever band he’s played with—was on stage; nothing was happening. For some reason I noticed a pudgy boy with short hair wandering through the sparse crowd, dressed in blue jeans and a white t-shirt on which was printed, in pencil, “
I LOVE MY LIFE
.” Then he climbed up and played the most shattering guitar I’d ever heard. “I think this is great,” said the person next to me. “Or is it terrible?”

“I didn’t start singing or playing till I was 15 and heard the Velvet Underground,” Richman said years later. “They made an
atmosphere,
and I knew then that I could make one too!” He got sanction: Richman signed with Warner Bros., which had hired John Cale, late of the Velvet Underground, as a staff producer, and it was Cale who was assigned to produce Jonathan Richman—Adam went into the studio with God.

The album they made was not released, and the band dissolved. “Road Runner” was just hearsay until 1975, when Richman assembled a few new Modern Lovers in Berkeley and recorded the song one last time; the tune saw the light of day on an otherwise forgettable sampler of local bands, and from then on it was a classic. Nothing could have been more unassuming: just bass, snare drum, and strummed guitar for the start, it sounded like a combination of a 1954 Sun Records tuneup and a 1967 Velvet Underground demo. Like Rod Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells a Story”—a cataclysm, and for most of its seven minutes no more than drums, bass, and acoustic guitar—“Road Runner” said that the power of rock ’n’ roll was all in its leaps from one moment to the next, in the impossibility of the transitions.

“One, two, three, four, five, six.” One-two / One-two-three-four is the traditional rock kickoff; in 1976 and 1977, with punk flying, a flat “One-two-three-four” would be the punk signpost. The punk rejection of the opening “One-two” meant that punk was ready to dispense with any warmup, with history; Richman’s addition of “five-six” meant that he
wasn’t ready, that he was taking a deep breath, that he was gearing up for a charge no one had made before.

“Road runner, road runner / Going faster miles an hour / Gonna drive by the Stop ’n’ Shop/With the radio on.” Choking on pleasure, on a teenager’s nostalgia for the previous day, Richman proceeded to turn wish into fact. He did drive past the Stop ’n’ Shop; but first, to make sure, he walked past the Stop ’n’ Shop, and concluded that he liked driving past the Stop ’n’ Shop much better than walking past the Stop ’n’ Shop, because he could have the radio on.

From there Richman drove into delight, then into reverie. He “felt in touch with the modern world”; he “felt in love with the modern world.” He “felt like a road runner.” He left Boston, headed out on Route 128: there were no limits. He punched the radio and heard 1956; “It was patient in the bushes, next to ’57!”

The band hammered down, James Brown–style, and then Richman pulled back like Jerry Lee Lewis in the middle of “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”—the message first shouted now whispered, reflective, spooky. He was on Route 128. It was cold, dark, he smelled the pine trees, he heard them as he rushed by with the radio on, he caught a glimpse of neon that was colder still—the modern world he was looking for. The band roared back, and Richman talked to the band about what he was seeing. “Now, what do you think about that, you guys?” “RADIO ON,” they answered him, and that was what he wanted to hear: “Good! We got the AM—” “RADIO ON,” the band said. “I think we got the power, got the magic now—” “RADIO ON.” “We got the feelin’ of the modern world—” “RADIO ON.” “We got the feelin’ of the modern sound—” “RADIO ON.”

Richman took one more deep breath—and every time I listen to this performance, I smile at what comes next. Every phrase of the song that’s come before, the most conventional narrative of an experience millions of people have had in any seamless teenage night, is broken down and recreated. Every phrase is reduced to single words, each word shuffled out of its phrase, verse and chorus broken into a shamanistic incantation, the chorus, left whole, fighting to keep up with the versifier’s incomprehensible rhythm and somehow succeeding, even though by now the words are barely words at
all, just Burma Shave signs flashing by too fast to read. There is a sudden increase in pressure:

The sound, of the modern radio, feelin’ when it’s late RADIO ON at night we got the sound of the modern lonely when it’s cold outside RADIO ON got the sound of Massachusetts when it’s blue and white RADIO ON cause out on Route 128 on the dark and lonely RADIO ON I feel alone in the cold and lonely RADIO ON I feel uh I feel alone in the cold and lonely RADIO ON I feel uh I feel alone in the cold and neon RADIO ON I feel alive I feel a love I feel alive RADIO ON I feel a rockin’ modern love I feel a rockin’ modern live RADIO ON I feel a rockin’ modern neon sound modern Boston town RADIO ON a modern sound modern neon modern miles around RADIO ON I say a road runner once a road runner twice RADIO ON ah ah very nice road runner gonna go home now yea RADIO ON road runner go home oh yes road runner go home—

In an act of pure violence, he breaks the pace. Returning to a conventional rock signature, it’s the violence of waking from a dream: “Here we go, now / We’re gonna drive him home, you guys / Here we go—” And the band hammers down again, twice three times, twice four times:

That’s right!

Again!

Bye Bye!

The Sex Pistols never went that far. Johnny Rotten ran through the tune as if it were a crack in the pavement waiting to break his mother’s back: he stepped on it and kept going. He called back to the band: “Do we know any other fucking songs we can do?”

“Johnny B. Goode” had the best beginning in rock ’n’ roll, but the Sex Pistols couldn’t play it. “Road Runner” had the best ending, and the Sex Pistols
didn’t have to play it—all they had to do was swallow it. What Jonathan Richman did with words, the Sex Pistols did with sound.

They found a corrosive momentum in the given rhythm that exploded all expectations, making everything that came before, be it the Velvet Underground’s 1967 “Heroin,” the Stooges’ 1969 “No Fun,” the New York Dolls’ 1974 “Human Being,” even Captain Beefheart’s 1969
Trout Mask Replica,
even “Road Runner,” seem rational: planned and executed. The Sex Pistols’ sound was irrational—as a sound, it seemed to make no sense at all, to make nothing, only to destroy, and this is why it was a new sound, and why it drew a line between itself and everything that came before it, just as Elvis Presley did in 1954 and the Beatles did in 1963, though nothing could be easier, or more impossible, than to erase those lines with a blur of footnotes.