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 January 15, 2007 The Thrill Is Gone (Some of It, Anyway) One bit of blues and rock’n’roll history has stayed in the back of my mind since I first read it in Peter Guralnick’s 1971 book, Feel Like Going Home. In his chapter on Sam Phillips, who established Sun Records in 1950 and recorded Elvis Presley’s first sides four years later, Guralnick notes that Phillips founded Sun to record a number of blues singers at the beginning of their careers. Phillips later leased some of those records to Leonard Chess, "who was just then starting out on his 5000 mile promotion and recording swings through the south cutting artists in the field and selling records out of the back of his car." The image of Leonard Chess hawking records out of the trunk of his car, like any other traveling salesman, has stayed in my mind ever since. I like to think he and Phillips ran into each other at various drugstores or appliance shops and compared notes on how to get the music they championed to as many listeners as possible. Chess and his brother, Phil, bought Aristocrat Records in 1947 and renamed it Chess Records three years later. By the early 1960s, a staggering number of white kids from the US and Britain had felt their lives transformed by hearing the music of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and many other blues and rock’n’roll singers on Chess and other small, independent labels. A lot of those kids made it their life’s mission to play that music. In 1997, Pete Seeger wondered "what the music experts of the 1930s would have thought if you had told them that the greatest influence on the popular music of this century would be some unknown black prisoners and field workers." Seeger had it about half right. Rock’n’roll, like most American music, was the product of the mingling of cultures. But, ultimately, it was the blues recordings on such labels as Chess that inspired American and British musicians to spark a revolution in pop music in the mid-’60s. What might have really puzzled those experts of the 1930s was how this music, so exotic and hard to come by that even American kids had to go out of their way to find it, would become a multi-billion-dollar industry. The Chess brothers and Sam Phillips made a lot of dough from blues and rock’n’roll, but I’d be surprised if, in their entire careers, they made as much as Mick Jagger has on the current Rolling Stones tour (as of mid-November, the band had raked in $437 million). The list of rock stars whose fortunes place them among the wealthiest people in the world -- David Bowie, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and on and on -- is staggeringly long, and such success would have been unimaginable to those stars themselves at the beginning of their careers. Even more surprising is the fact that these musicians can still fill stadiums and sports arenas. Some of them continue to make good records, but it’s the music they made at their creative peaks that still brings in the crowds. I don’t begrudge any of them the money; as long as they’re able to sell concert tickets, they’re entitled to the thrill they get from performing. Yet I find myself disappointed that so many of these artists continue to drag themselves out to give people of my generation another shot of nostalgia. The musicians from the era of classic rock have so dominated pop culture that younger bands, reaching for the golden ring themselves, simply recycle the ideas of their predecessors. The last time rock seemed to be rejuvenated was in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when alternative rock made its way into the mainstream. Even then, such bands as R.E.M., Nirvana, and Pearl Jam built on musical ideas that had been around since at least the mid-1960s (and grouping them as I’ve just done shows how nebulous the term alternative rock is). R.E.M.’s jangling guitars came from mid-’60s folk rock, Nirvana took its cue from the hard-edged punk of the New York Dolls, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols, and Pearl Jam seemed to have absorbed every hard-rock record of the 1970s, from Deep Purple to Led Zeppelin. I can’t think of many recent bands whose work sounds like a breakthrough in pop music. The Flaming Lips follow their own muse, but their sound is so eccentric that there’s room for only one band that sounds like them. I enjoyed Fountains of Wayne’s Welcome Interstate Managers, but the songs were based on forms and sounds established long ago. Critics’ favorites the White Stripes play songs that echo the great blues musicians of the postwar years and the ’60s bands that followed them. The best thing about the White Stripes is that they keep their recordings simple, which is a step in the right direction. When I mentioned to a friend of mine that rock music was starting to sound repetitive to me, she replied, "Our parents said the same thing." The difference is that our parents didn’t grow up listening to rock’n’roll. To them, it did all sound the same, just as Andy Williams and Frank Sinatra sounded alike to us. I began to notice a mind-numbing sameness in rock a little more than ten years ago, when every new, young band sounded like Pearl Jam to me. I also noticed that the recordings by young bands sounded too perfect. They’d been fussed over so much that the spontaneity so essential to rock had been drained out of them. Part of the blame for the blandness of much current pop music can be laid at the feet of record companies. Popular music has long been a big business, and the five major labels (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group, Warner Bros. Music, and BMG Entertainment) don’t take risks. The accountants and businessmen who run record labels now didn’t, in most instances, come up through the ranks of the music industry. The men and women who ran the great labels of the past -- King, Roulette, Cameo/Parkway, and others -- could be cutthroat, and often treated their artists unfairly, but at least they knew the music, and they knew what to listen for when scouting for new talent. Today’s record-label execs think we want to hear only more of what’s already out there. It’s too simple, though, to put all the blame on record companies for rock’s stagnation. The sad truth is that, today, music doesn’t play a central role in most kids’ lives. It did for my generation, and while that may have led to some pretentious records, it also inspired many bands of the 1960s and ’70s to push beyond themselves and their abilities. I know there are kids nowadays who like music, and some who are even passionate about it, but for most teenagers and college students, music is only one of many diversions. Video games, movies, DVDs, and a host of other distractions take them away from music as a prime concern. We live in a much larger pop-culture world than the one that brought us the rock-music innovations of the 1960s and ’70s. A few months ago, on NPR’s Fresh Air, rocker Tom Petty told Terry Gross that AM radio was what brought rock’n’roll, soul music, and even older pop singers like Sinatra to him and his friends. "I still see it as this real magical thing," he said, "and I miss it in a way, because music has become so compartmentalized now, but in those days it was all right in one spot." Because AM radio was then so broad in its approach, listeners became educated in different pop-music styles, and musicians influenced each other in a much more immediate way than they do now. The great bands of the 1960s and ’70s couldn’t repeat themselves because their fans demanded more of them. Today’s bands are often damned -- as often by critics as by fans -- when they try anything different. Perhaps these are just the grumblings of a middle-aged fan who’s heard too many records and is hard to impress. But as I write this, James Brown has just died at age 73. It’s no overstatement to say that he was as significant a figure in American culture as any politician or diplomat. I can’t think of a comparable pop musician today -- Bono, perhaps. Brown, like Ray Charles and Elvis before him, and the Beatles and Stones after him, helped form popular music as we know it. And through his music and his actions, James Brown, as much as any civil-rights leader, eased the steps we’ve taken toward racial reconciliation in America. U2, as good as they are, can’t make a claim that large. I still hear and buy plenty of rock CDs. I like the Kings of Leon, the Magic Numbers, My Morning Jacket, and many others. Wilco is as experimental and exciting a band as a music fan could hope for. Most of these groups, however, have limited followings, and none is especially revolutionary. Rock music might be poised for a big breakthrough that will revitalize it. For now, however, it appears to be fragmented and stuck on Repeat. …Joseph Taylor
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