Robert Christgau's great book "Any Old Way You Choose It" contains an article wherein he's driving across America in the wake of a broken relationship. As he goes along he admires various songs on AM radio which have similar themes. "So what happens,", he muses, "when that piece of well-constructed schlock on the radio is actually your life ?". A question I often find myself asking right now as I listen to various songs by, in particular, Richard Thompson and Neil Young.
Rock'n'roll has always been based upon a notion of authenticity. When you hear a popular song from the pre-Elvis era you know that it's insincere and fake. When you listen to an orchestra playing classical music you know that to the players it's just a job. Elvis blew all that to pieces; he merged two forms, black r'n'b and white country, to form rockabilly and then rock'n'roll. Both forms are ethnic musics where the real experiences of people on the wrong side of the American Dream are expressed. Authenticity is a given. We believe that Robert Johnson really did suffer "stones in my passway".
Elvis planted this raw honesty onto the stages, TV screens, and radio stations of an affluent 1950s America. It changed the Western world. In Britain a generation brought up on Victorian moral values by parents who still in large number paid lip-service to being Christians heard something in American rock'n'roll which struck chords of truth and liberation. We were taught when we were young to bury our feelings (Richard Thompson :- "where I come from feeling is a crime"), tow the line, and be respectable. Elvis spoke to malcontents like John Lennon whose hearts were screaming to escape the repression of the time. Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed made sense to the likes of Mick Jagger, Keith Richard, Eric Burden etc. Authenticity was the key.
That is why it is genuinely problematical when songwriters try to claim that the characters in their songs are not them. They are writing and performing in a medium based on the singer really meaning what they're saying. That's not to say that every single line has to be taken as strict autobiography - there's no need to reprimand Randy Newman because he actually isn't God - but there has to be a basic trust between performer and audience. If a singer is "acting" when performing a song then it really isn't rock music.
Throughout the 1960s none of this was an issue. People in their millions identified with the joy and sarcasm of the Beatles, the raw aggression of the Stones, the naked anger and honesty of Bob Dylan, the intensity of The Who, the questing spirituality of the Grateful Dead etc. The problems started during the singer-songwriter boom at the end of the 1960s, when a group of artists develop an entire aesthetic around their personal sufferings.
So were they for real ? Exhibit no. one : Neil Young. His breakthrough album was "After The Goldrush", containing lines such as "I am lonely but you can free me" as well as a cover of "Oh Lonesome Me". The next album, "Harvest", cemented the image of what Nick Kent calls the "world's most lonesome boy" (e.g. "Out On The Weekend", "Old Man"). But we know that Neil Young's own life has never been anything like that. Does that make him a fake ? It's very hard to say anything against probably the most talented single performer and writer in the entire genre, but I think it does make him a little suspect. The credibility of seminally raw, insightful albums like "Tonight's The Night" and "On The Beach" is undeniable - these records establish a whole new vocabulary of untarnished, direct rock music. But when he gets sad and pretty he does sound phoney.
By contrast there is Lou Reed. Lou has consistently adopted the persona of a journalist "saying the unsayable" about the urban world around him. No-one thinks he was a heroin addict in 1966, yet that, of course, is the title of probably his strongest song. Ellen Willis captured it brilliantly in her article in the "Stranded" book - the song makes you simultaneously sorry for the poor guy and want to reach out for the needle. The addict's perspective is used to make genuine statements about the corrupt, impersonal world outside and the singer's attitude towards it. Since then Lou has made a lot of trashy, disposable music ("Transformer" is a dreadful album), yet he has never been a phoney.
Exhibit no. two : Richard Thompson. The man as portrayed in the BBC's "A Solitary Life" documentary is a mild, affable, and humorous chap married to a lovely warm lady, tending his garden, and happily playing with his young son. He writes songs when he has to, working from nine to five in a room away from the family. His wife cannot reconcile the writer of such bleak, dark material with the gentle and cheerful man she knows. This is disturbing. Thompson's work has been consistently bleak througout his career, filled with sentiments such as "the world has no comfort to bring", "the world's no place when you're on your own", and "there's nothing at the end of the rainbow". There have been many times recently when these sentiments have directly echoed my own feelings.
And there's the rub. Feelings such as these don't do anyone any good, least of all the disenfranchised and isolated people who experience them on a regular basis. Isn't there something rather cynical about a happily-married man with a stable career writing all these bleak songs which feed off and reinforce the negative emotions of people less fortunate than himself ? Of course it's absurd to maintain that you have to be miserable in order to write a sad song, but to create an entire portfolio of bleak, dark, bitter songs which have nothing to do with your own life - isn't that a bit suspect ? Thompson is an amazing guitarist, an acute lyricist, and a very great song-writer, but isn't there something a bit cynical about the whole deal ? All I know is that I've actually been to the world which his darkest songs inhabit and it's not a place to visit often.
It's rock'n'roll. You've got to walk it like you talk it.
