Ira Robbins

Yet on the Clash’s new live album, the grandly titled “From Here to Eternity,” the one track recorded at that concert doesnt sound like the bell tolling on punks English dream. While the band plays “Career Opportunities,” a biting proletarian gripe from its first album, a shade slower (and longer), its otherwise true to the studio original, down to the crappy mix and uncoordinated Joe Strummer-Mick Jones joint vocals. Other songs from a Boston theater date a scant month earlier on that same tour are cut from the same loudly flapping but sturdy cloth. In fact, the entire 17-song collection, which documents a four-year stretch beginning in early ’78, sounds like it could have been come from one set. The album’s diversity — the reggae lope of “Armagideon Time,” a cover starring nasal toaster Mikey Dread; the blue-beat guilt trip of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais”; the somber moodiness of “Straight to Hell”; the urban guerrilla-riddim rumble of “Guns of Brixton”; the racing New York rhythm rock of “Magnificent Seven” (with vocal audience participation) — is due less to any growth in the band’s concert ambitions but from the original records, artifacts that are now so far removed from Limp Bizkit land that the Clash fighting the law (… but the law won) in 1978 might as well be the Bobby Fuller Four doing the song in 1966.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - -
-

When the Clash crossed the Atlantic and first revealed themselves to obsessed Americans in early 1979, the Londoners welcomed themselves with the defensive disdain of “I’m So Bored With the U.S.A.” and then a musical barrage of furiously wound energy and death-or-glory conviction. (Which might actually have been abject post-colonial nerves sublimated into cocky aggression.) Back at New York’s Palladium later that same year, they brought along keyboardist Mickey Gallagher, enough guitars to outfit Cheap Trick and a not-entirely salutary measure of confidence as seasoned stage hands and burgeoning rock stars.

In early ’80, the Clash paid a final call on the Palladium, a rock shrine that is currently a hole that will soon house New York University students. The band’s instinct for onstage anarchy battled to a draw with its self-imposed challenge of “London Calling,” an expanding nova of an album whose restraint, variety and subtlety broke punk’s clutches without renouncing it. With the solipsistic intimacy New Yorkers grow to expect, the cover photo, of Paul Simonon wielding a bass with seconds to live, had been shot at the venue on the group’s second visit there.

What had first excited me about the Clash was also a photo, this one printed in the New Musical Express (or maybe it was Melody Maker) of Joe Strummer, clinging to a mike stand (as he often did) on his knees. The singer’s head was whipping around so that his mouth was trailing a few centimeters in a contortion that reeked of pure rock release. Or so I imagine remembering clearly. The yellowed newsprint is somewhere in a box in my closet, and thats where its gonna stay. Whatever the particulars, that moment in late ’76 made an impression, attaching a sense of excitement to the word “Clash” that was better than any of the other 999 the photo might have conjured up.

In 1991, Legacy Records was preparing to reissue the only Clash long-player not already on CD: “Black Market Clash,” an artistically strong 10-inch oddity of rarities and studio leftovers from 1980. The modest project quickly blossomed into a full-blown box set, fraught with all the complications possible to the estranged, quarrelsome and jealous remnants of a non-functioning band possessing such a favorable contract that no compilation of any sort could be released without their unanimous permission. Which was, needless to say, difficult to obtain. Active vendettas continued, dormant prejudices resurfaced and greedy debates erupted over the inclusion of each songwriter’s compositions.

The more the band (minus alternating drummers Nicky “Topper” Headon and Terry Chimes, both of whom had been kicked out of the band at one time or another and neither of whom seemed to have a say) got involved, the weirder and worse things got. Plans sent to them came back rearranged and broken, like fragile toys loaned to hyperactive children, or an innocent nymph sent out to play by the river with Frankenstein’s monster. The two who were managed by one’s former girlfriend had, years earlier, with the Iago-like encouragement of their highly dubious manager, sacked the third, a disastrous rift that had leveled the band, leaving a now-all-but-forgotten cultural hangover.

At one point, the corporate junta to which I was serving as an unpaid advisor against the promise of getting to write the liner notes plotted four discs (under the dubious title “Scrawl on the Wall” — I was pushing for “Garageland,” but no one wanted to know) with live tracks from the Clash’s calamitous summer-of-’81 stand at Bond’s, a former clothing store in Times Square. Three tracks here are from those shows: “Complete Control,” “Guns of Brixton” and Jones’ smartly rendered “Train in Vain.”

Sensing the rare opportunity of having its hated major label over a barrel, Strummer, Jones and Simonon attacked like vultures. They nixed the box’s live component and instead proposed that it be released as a separate live album the following year. The band’s dreadlocked Super 8 pal Don Letts had filmed the Bond’s shows for a documentary that was going to be called — accurately as well as ironically — “The Clash on Broadway.” So putting seven and seven together to get 22, the Clash — in their infinitely twisted determinism — decreed that “The Clash on Broadway” would suit a three-CD retrospective of their studio work. It didn’t, and left more than a few wondering what the title had to do with anything. (Letts’ film is finished and about to be released as the career history “Westway to the World.”)

“The Clash on Broadway” wasn’t their only logic-busting whim concerning the project (which, for me, turned out to be a financially satisfying fiasco), but it was typical of the irrational pragmatism that ruled an endlessly self-destructive but marvelous career. They ran hard and left a deep and lasting mark, but the Clash — like the romantic rebels they worshiped — were ultimately undone by the surprise of their own humanity.

My own memories of the Clash in concert are indistinct blurs of thrill, thrall and self-righteousness. At the time, the shows provided ear-splitting confirmation that the records were as real and direct as they seemed, that the band was neither a studio creation or an Oz-like projection. But what have we got to show for it now? “From Here to Eternity” is the genuine historical article, a sonic yardstick against which to measure those 20-year-old memories.

While by no means a greatest hits — the band’s eccentric song selection brashly (if not surprisingly) omits the top-20 U.S. hit “Rock the Casbah” (a song they couldn’t make much out of live, anyway) as well as such classics of the studio and live canon as “White Riot,” “Garageland,” “Safe European Home” and “Tommy Gun” — “From Here to Eternity” is raw, energetic and sloppy. With skinny tie culture relegated to bad-hair camp nostalgia on VH1, few bands of the period could suddenly resurface on record and not sound dated and ridiculous, but the Clash were no ordinary band. Except for Simonon’s painfully numb vocals on “Guns of Brixton,” these realistic performances are proud souvenirs, not embarrassing snapshots.

But the fact is (and I confirmed this suspicion by rewatching the concert sequences in “Rude Boy,” the band’s enthusiastically incoherent 1980 drama-cum-documentary), you had to see it to get it. The devout crowds, Strummer’s leg-driving intensity and saliva-spattering bellowing, Jones’ studied guitar-hero shuffle and frilly clothes, Simonon’s animal poses — the impossible cohesion of musicians doing their slashing and slamming with barely a flicker of acknowledgment that they aren’t alone onstage — that was the Clash. Their sound doesn’t adequately convey the fury.

The Clash’s stubborn refusal to do what was good for them was often mistaken for courage, but theirs was a bizarrely principled sort of nerve. Although their lyrics quickly abandoned the free-floating anomie that made so much punk interchangeable, record company malfeasance was a fight they liked. “Complete Control,” the song that opens “From Here to Eternity” (as it opened many of the band’s 1978 gigs), was the band’s third 45, a rocking rebuke to English CBS for releasing “Remote Control” as a single against their wishes. (Not that either side of the dispute had any problems resolving their differences and plucking a hit single from the dust-up.)

While they would go on to name an album in tribute to Nicaraguan revolutionaries, sport Italian terrorist fan T-shirts and sing of “English Civil War,” “Spanish Bombs” and “Washington Bullets,” backyard culture wars were just as good. London Calling’s “Right Profile,” a film-freak’s ode to the troubled life of Montgomery Clift, and “Capital Radio,” which here provides Strummer with a platform to endorse exotic Americans Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs (“Wooly Bully”) over London prole peers Sham 69, are typical.

In British parlance, the Clash were all mouth and no trousers, irrepressible rabble-rousers disinclined to shed blood. Their legal troubles were laughable — petty offenses like spray-painting a wall and shooting pigeons. For a time, they did put themselves on the line for their fans, but as their enterprise became more ambitious and complicated (read former roadie extraordinaire Johnny Green’s witty memoir, “A Riot of Our Own,” for details), they generally marched into battle for more usual things. All egotistical rock stars make up twisted rules of conduct for themselves, but the code by which the Clash made people miserable was more twisted and paradoxical. In the end, the Clash disillusioned all but their blindest acolytes, capping a once-proud saga with a shameful coda (including a new lineup and an afterbirth album) and pained attempts to justify the same sort of hubris less self-conscious rock stars admit as bald arrogance. Their achievements in the uncharted world of big-league punk were unique, but their failings were absolutely ordinary.

It feels thoroughly ridiculous, like some old Bolshevik still mourning the death of Stalin, to be rehoisting the partisan flag at this late date, but the old records did, and still do — to borrow from an advertising slogan used at the time — matter. At least in their music, the Clash had standards. Their strongly worded statements about serious issues raised issues and challenged complacency while kicking asses with the sheer joy of their sonic assault. Leaving love, sex and the usual agents of angst to lower-minded outfits, the Clash took a literary approach to morality in songs that still seethe with bravado and invention.

Few groups of their day had the vocal and lyrical toughness to match their slashing slabs of guitar noise or the ability to proffer tender sentimentality without shame. And to their credit, the Clash have still not succumbed to the temptation of reunion, as have virtually all of their surviving contemporaries, from the Sex Pistols to Blondie. The enigma of who the Clash really were — art-project phonies, naive political romantics, confused rock rebels, arrogant pseudo-intellectuals, substance-abusing hypocrites in camo gimmick gear — will never be resolved. As Strummer warns here in a rushed and ragged “London Calling,” “Now don’t look to us/Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust.” Don’t expect an answer here.

In 1993, answering a plea for one original tune from 15-minute British pop star Wendy James, Elvis banged out an album’s worth in a weekend, scraps of brilliance delivered with the evident effort of a waiter clearing a table of spilled caviar. So inept was her handling of this bounty (no Jagger she), it largely escaped notice that E.C., in his distinctive and compelling style, had provided gimmicks and retreads — more than adequate to her needs, but nothing he’d be bothered to sing on his own records. Had he kept them, other than a few standouts the songs might have made useful B sides, bonus tracks or shelf-sitters awaiting that extra jolt of ambition. Maybe artists as talented as Costello have trouble gauging the creative exertion each project demands. Maybe the line separating genius from hubris is hard to hold over time.

Writing songs for Wendy James was one of a sequence of events that led Costello to reconvene the Attractions — the supple English trio that abetted Elvis’s many moods until his need for new challenges became overwhelming in the mid-’80s — for the potently invigorated “Brutal Youth” in 1994. Since then, Costello has primarily explored the land beyond rock, in collaboration with Bacharach, jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, opera star Anne Sofie von Otter and others.

All of this makes “When I Was Cruel” — which begins brashly with “45,” an acknowledgment of the artist’s advancing age that cleverly fits 7-inch vinyl and the war years under the same numerical heading — a significant test of Costello’s ability to reinsert himself into the world he willingly (and not unwisely) left behind. If the preceding era didn’t exactly spoil Costello for rock, it did leave that part of his muse a bit out of whack. “When I Was Cruel” is no great late addition to a brilliant career, no sudden burst of creativity in unexplored realms. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before,” he sings in the cloying, overlong “Alibi,” and those familiar with his work of the ’80s will surely detect echoes of those years in nearly every song here.

The most compelling tunes, “Tear Off Your Own Head (It’s a Doll Revolution)” and “My Little Blue Window,” recycle the past to delightful effect, but that shouldn’t be the best that can be said of a new album by an artist of Costello’s caliber. In the shadow of a catalog containing such taut earthmovers as “She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake,” “Sometimes I think that love is just a tumor/ You’ve got to cut it out” and “Your mind is made up but your mouth is undone,” there’s not much to say about mundane choruses like “15 petals/ One for every year I spent with you/ Jewels and precious metals will never do” or “Well I believe we just/ Become a speck of dust.”

The presence of keyboard player Steve Nieve and drummer Pete Thomas (who never got full credit for the tension and power of Costello’s early records) only commits the Elvis youth reclamation project deeper to the past tense. (Davey Faragher, a veteran of Cracker and John Hiatt’s band, does the Bruce Thomas bass parts here.) Singing with unabashed vigor, gamely chucking up doses of aggressive guitar distortion and a spot of squalling harmonica, Costello gives the old days another go. But other than testing his own mettle — for whatever that’s worth to someone who’s written with Bacharach, covered Charles Mingus and sung for Tony Bennett — what’s it for?

There’s more wrong here than the inevitable maturation of a no-longer-angry middle-aged man. No one is going to attack a happily married fella for loving his wife and singing about it. In his pop-crooner mode, love and loss are the language spoken, and a cutting remark would be gauche, but writing rock songs again sets him in competition with some of the smartest, most trenchant music ever written and recorded. The iceberg tipped by the euphoric rush of “Lipstick Vogue,” “Pump It Up” and “Radio Radio” is a massive obstacle for this album to navigate. If the performances here reclaimed the sputtering, spastic fury of Elvis and the Attractions in their prime, it might not matter that Costello came to play without indelible melodies and jaw-dropping lyrics, but they really don’t and he largely did.

The album’s charms, which do exist, are slow to emerge. The seductively personal and disarmingly serious lawyer plaint “Soul for Hire” is sparely arranged with scraping sound effects to offset the vocal syncopation; “Daddy Can I Turn This” is oblique and ominous; “Radio Silence” is a solemnly played current-events coda in the vein of “Shipbuilding” or “Pills and Soap.” But “When I Was Cruel” drifts more than it drives, jumping stylistic periods, with forced, graceless hooks and the sort of rote character studies (“Spooky Girlfriend,” “Tart”) his pop life might have rendered obsolete. “Dust 2 …” and “… Dust” split one sentimental idea in two for no-waiting déjà entendu. While Costello is too smart for self-parody, “Episode of Blonde,” with its lunatic lyrics and patches of Dylan shtick, comes mighty close, and “Dissolve” is essentially “5ive Gears in Reverse” without a melody. Even the album’s centerpiece, “When I Was Cruel No. 2,” stretches the gripping atmos-noir of “Watching the Detectives” into a lengthy bore.

Endurance presents a different challenge in rock than it does in jazz, blues or pop. Physicality, youthful allure and creative momentum are less relevant to the aging titans of those musics than to rockers struggling to beat the clock. Credible artistic careers of 30 or 40 years, the rule in many realms, are the exception in rock. Costello’s reinvention as a vocalist was a prudent move, and this belated attempt to have it both ways is proof. If he hasn’t lost the ability to rock with conviction, at the very least he’s shown that it’s no longer a simple matter of choice. “It was so much easier when I was cruel,” he sings, and he’s undoubtedly right.

George Harrison’s short life in the material world was never, it seems, entirely to his taste: He enjoyed the Beatles’ stardom far less than his older band mates, rarely mounting its social platform and declining the seduction of its pleasures, turning his back on it quicker than even the loudly principled John Lennon. The publicity that might have aided his causes was too intrusive for his comfort, so he shunned it. Rather than exploit his fame, Harrison held fast to his convictions and quietly followed his passions away from the spotlight. Music was only one aspect of his creative existence and, in recent years, scarcely a part of it at all.

Even before a crazed intruder stabbed and nearly killed him two years ago, Harrison’s dedication to peace and love couldn’t insulate him from the world’s venom. His legal battles must have pained him deeply, involving as they did honesty and character as much as money. When the band that came together to sing “All You Need Is Love” discovered just how greatly they needed lawyers to go their separate ways, Harrison turned his disgust into “Sue Me, Sue You Blues.” The ruling that he had “subconsciously plagiarized” the melody of “My Sweet Lord” (a judgment easily confirmed by a listen to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”) turned one of the most pious pop hits ever lofted into a sullied casualty of commerce. As a consolation prize to himself, Harrison wrote “This Song” to air his grievances, ruefully noting “… this song came to me/ quite unknowingly.”

Even HandMade Films, a company he set up to produce such weird and wonderful English cinema of the ’80s as “Time Bandits,” “Mona Lisa” and “Withnail and I,” ended up in court, with Harrison successfully suing his business partner of 20 years. (London’s PeopleNews.com recently claimed that Harrison nixed the use of Beatles music on the soundtrack of the forthcoming Sean Penn film “I Am Sam” as elephantine punishment for “Shanghai Surprise,” a disastrous 1986 project that starred Penn and Madonna.)

There’s no shortage of irony to be found in the land of George, a man who could sincerely devote himself to a life of pacific spirituality, do charitable deeds on a massive scale (his 1971 New York concerts for Bangladesh began the practice of rock superstar social-conscience fundraising), write idylls like “Here Comes the Sun” and obsess over what he viewed as fiscal persecution. With a catalog that includes the viciously sharp “Taxman” as well as “Only a Northern Song,” a wry, almost actionable ditty about a hated music publishing company, one can only surmise how heavily such matters weighed on him. Even his belated reflection on the Beatles, 1987′s trivial “When We Was Fab,” grouses that “income tax was all we had.”

He was the lead guitarist in a band that didn’t really need one. Despite the Beatles’ influence in every other aspect of pop life, it was Eric Clapton — who, for a time, alienated the affections of Harrison’s first wife (the delectable Pattie Boyd, first encountered as an extra in “A Hard Day’s Night”) and crafted a hit single, “Layla,” in the bargain — who really made flashy solos the essential instrumental voice of ’60s rock. (To his credit, Harrison wasn’t one to let a woman get between guitarists; the two icons of passive-aggressive superstardom remained close friends to the end.)

Never really abandoning the Beatles’ recognition of songwriting’s primacy, Harrison was prone to keeping his six-string commentary humble and pungent. He had Clapton play one of the most prominent and potent solos on a Beatles record, paradoxically because of long-simmering frustration about his creative place in the group. Harrison shrewdly invited Clapton onto “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” so his chronically unenthusiastic band mates would consider recording the song. A lifetime later, McCartney — speaking to reporters immediately after Harrison’s death — referred to him, eight months his junior, as “my baby brother.” Families never change.

While it was the songs and voices of Lennon and McCartney that led the Beatles to enduring influence, Harrison’s embrace of Indian music added a welcome, if wholly unexpected, note to the proceedings, instantly and forever changing Western awareness of the Asian subcontinent. Not coincidentally, the entrancing light drone of sitar became the heavy drug drone of psychedelia — the exotic instrument Harrison gingerly introduced on Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” in 1965 circled around and became the extravagant, mind-bending rock blur of his own “It’s All Too Much” barely four years later.

In between those markers, Harrison created the song that most clearly articulated his devotion, both artistic and philosophical, to India. “Within You Without You,” his sole compositional contribution to “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (employing no other Beatles and no rock instruments), pairs worldview and personality in lines that now seem prophetic.

“The people who hide themselves
Behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth
Then it’s far too late
When they pass away.”

Whether he was warning others or testing his own conviction, the admonition stands. “The time will come when you see we’re all one/ And life flows on within you and without you.” Life will flow on without him, but on a course for which one is in George Harrison’s debt.

As tributes go, this concert staged for television — TNT will broadcast some of it on that most Beach Boys-like (not to mention James Watt-est) of days, the Fourth of July — primarily succeeded in making Wilson seem less than the genius so many enthusiastically proclaimed him to be.

Focusing on him as a songwriter rather than as a studio auteur was a self-defeating exercise. To prove it, Paul Simon, Elton John, Vince Gill, Billy Joel and others grappled with tunes inextricable from their original studio incarnations. That the back-in-action Go-Go’s rocked up “Surf City” and “Little Honda” like enthusiastic new lovers only proved the degree to which California punk-poppers have internalized the Beach Boys. And as anyone who doesn’t look down on the Beach Boys as a ’60s novelty knows, those aren’t the songs Wilson deserves to be remembered for.

His legacy properly rests on innovative landmarks like “Surf’s Up” and “Good Vibrations,” which was oddly handed over to the Wilson sisters — Ann and Nancy of Heart — and opera singer Jubilant Sykes. In his introduction, Sir George suggested that the song, with its discontinuous complexity and harmonic sophistication, was all but unperformable.

Perhaps he was unaware that the Beach Boys (and lesser bands armed with no more than a few true singers and a theremin) long ago put paid to the belief that Wilson’s 3:35 studio gem had permanently relocated his creativity outside the reach of the kind of rock ‘n’ roll that’s so simple any half-wit could play it. Even the stars of “Barracuda” and “Magic Man” — aided immeasurably by Wilson’s nonpareil touring band, an augmented incarnation of Los Angeles’ Wondermints, which played all of the songs with finesse and respect and provided the requisite harmonies — were able to hang on, at least until Ann’s ill-advised rock improv at the end.

Wilson’s greatest achievements came not at the keyboard, where he composed his achingly beautiful melodies, but in the studio, where a guileless young man in his 20s, driven by faith in what he could hear in his head, believed that his future, and maybe that of all pop music, lay beyond three-chord odes to cars or girls. Brian took received wisdom — catchy tunes, sweet harmonies, teen-dream lyrics — and set sail beyond the horizon of AM haikus for music of greater ambition and no less appeal. That’s not an easy idea to convey at an all-star tribute, and certainly not one “Help Me Rhonda” ruiner Ricky Martin could explain with his windup pelvis. Wilson clearly envisioned his creations as sounds more than structures — which explains their occasional lapses in logic as well as his inability to keep pace with the master craftsmen who followed his lead. (Todd Rundgren’s effortless-sounding re-creations of “Good Vibrations” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” on his “Faithful” album underscore the acceleration of studio facility in a single decade.)

The concert’s centerpiece — a complete performance of the wonderful “Pet Sounds” by Wilson and a procession of stars, many of whom turned in sensitive, heartfelt performances — dismantled the artistically advanced and arguably cohesive album (God only knows how the resigned alienation of “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” can be understood to cohere with the Caribbean sailing misadventure “Sloop John B” or the pimply sexual longing of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”) into a carelessly assembled K-Tel concert anthology of awkwardly juxtaposed singles.

What’s more, only Wilson — controlled and functional but still unnervingly remote at 58, an unblinking survivor retracing familiar steps — himself had the presence of mind and humility to acknowledge the true provenance of the songs for which he was being compared to Mozart. He singled out “Pet Sounds” lyricist Tony Asher and Van Dyke Parks (coauthor of “Heroes and Villains,” the poetic-sounding nonsense words of “Surf’s Up” and one of the five men behind “Sail on Sailor”) in the audience and thanked them. But he also left many debts unpaid, not the least of them to conspicuously unrepresented former bandmates, including his late brothers Dennis and Carl (who got a dedication for dying but less credit for living). And just because right-wing transcendental-meditator/creep singer Mike Love had to go to court in 1992 to establish his contributions to the Beach Boys oeuvre doesn’t mean he didn’t make them. (Actually, there was never any disagreement that Love co-wrote “Little Honda,” “Darlin’,” “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “Wild Honey” and the words he and Carl Wilson sang in “Good Vibrations.” The lawsuit he won against Brian Wilson established his rights in 29 others.)

It’s typical of tributes in which enthusiasm overshadows facts that a songwriter with no shortage of estimable compositions should be feted with songs he didn’t write. At one point in the show, David Crosby took two tries to complete an awkward rendition of “Sloop John B,” a folk ballad the group recorded but laid no claim to authorship of. “Barbara Ann,” which served as one of the all-star encores, was a hit for the Bronx’s own Regents in 1961, well before the Beach Boys ever heard themselves on the radio. Then there’s “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” which might as well be a cover. (In “Heroes & Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys,” Steven Gaines claims that Wilson and Love borrowed the lyrical idea of a Chubby Checker hit and the music of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little 16″; the song’s joint credits were only formalized after Berry’s camp sued.)

But who really cares about such music-nerd trivia? With creative evaluation being increasingly elbowed out by thoughtless consensus in our post-critical celebrity era — box-office stats, chart positions, magazine covers and awards shows mean far more than the individual musings of effete intellectuals — public interest in nit-picking career details is no match for juicy personal details. Blame is banished in victim culture, and the cost for screwing up a life, whether one’s own or someone else’s, is no more than a cursory mea culpa for a misbegotten past, no matter how recent it may have been. (Calling Leif Garrett …)

With that, life itself becomes the all-purpose excuse for lapses in artistry. Like the media-ready high school students who fill our screens with pithy sound bites every time TV cameras arrive at the scene of a shooting, the glossed-over simplification of “Behind the Music” is now a blueprint for popular redemption. Brian Wilson’s story is custom-made for cable catharsis — the bloated, bedridden burnout who sacrificed his soul to create his teenage symphonies to God and became a serial victim of drug-fueled psychosis, charlatans and thieves, all of it traceable to the spiteful dad-manager who deafened his ear, undercut his confidence and then sold off his songs. But a sad story with a happy ending hardly mirrors the arc of Wilson’s work.

Like many of his surviving contemporaries, Wilson’s 40-year career yielded timeless work only in its first decade. Even at top form, crafting the songs that made the Beach Boys “America’s Band,” he wasn’t infallible. And then came the maudlin, weird and frequently embarrassing results of mental, physical and emotional stress. (It should be acknowledged, however, that there actually are people who play “The Beach Boys Love You,” the 1977 album that contains Wilson’s ridiculous ode to Johnny Carson, for enjoyment.) His sporadic releases over the past 20 years were only imitations of what we knew he could do, and the tribute concert reflected that, proffering only two songs written since the early ’70: the sincere but ungainly memorial “Lay Down Burden” and the concert’s coda, a solo rendition of 1988′s almost-great “Love and Mercy.”

Not to drown in semantics, but genius can’t be such a fleeting gift. Do we now need to edit and excuse to safely recognize the demeaned idols of our time? J.D. Salinger, Joseph Mitchell and Ralph Ellison also peaked early, but they just stopped cold and so fixed their legends in ice. People never do that in the eternal world of pop music, not unless they lose their minds or their lives. With its hacks, has-beens and one-hit wonders, rock ‘n’ roll happily consigns the no longer creative to recycle past glories on the oldies circuit, and can only forgive the self-deluded efforts of the once great so long as they don’t stop playing their hits. Pete Townshend of the currently reunited Who — which recorded its superfluous final album in 1982 and has been making rumblings about doing another — wrote earlier this year, “I have not discovered a single ‘perfect’ Who song in any of my trawlings through my old stuff or recent stuff.” Thank goodness for “My Generation.”

In fact, it’s probably better for most of the old-timers if they keep their creativity under a basket. (Not Bob Dylan and Neil Young, however — they can keep going forever as far as I’m concerned.) Increasingly distant achievements can’t keep a reputation aloft in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary. The eminence of “God Only Knows,” “In My Room” and “Caroline, No” buys a lot of goodwill, but turning a blind eye to subsequent entries in the failure column only diminishes popular music’s claims to enduring significance. Right now, up in Palminteri’s Bronx, Chuck Knoblauch — the Yankees’ millionaire infielder who lost the ability to hit the side of a barn last year — is being cheered every time he doesn’t boot a routine play in his safer reposting to left field. The diminished expectations that now coddle Wilson have led to an equally condescending miscalculation of his past.

Palminteri mentioned that it wasn’t cool to like the Beach Boys back in the day, but he didn’t explain why. Before Wilson turned inward, their wimpy idealism overshadowed the joy of their sound. Rock was the voice of anger, angst and rebellion while surf music was the quintessence of good times. (Even Wilson’s adaptation of the full-throated Phil Spector production style took it from tense drama to ebullient release.) Wilson’s artistic stature improved as his life fell apart; he was a surviving victim of rock ‘n’ roll whose body somehow outlasted his mind. In a twisted way, Brian’s troubles — which also led to darker, more revealing songs — made his achievements more profound and went a long way to counter the awfulness of what his “Kokomo”-singing Disneyized bandmates got up to in his absence. In hindsight, it was easier to appreciate the group’s records if they could be viewed as the work of a solitary demented genius battling untold forces arrayed against him. In the process, Wilson came to singly embody all that was good about the Beach Boys, from start to finish. Their work became his work, which reduced the others to tag-alongs or, worse, hindrances out to stymie his muse. Wilson indisputably had the vision, conviction and sonic imagination. He was primarily, by a large margin, responsible for both the group’s existence and its importance. But he clearly didn’t do it alone.

“Links on the Chain,” which I learned to sing (if not quite play) that summer, wasn’t your typical protest song. While others attacked oppressive governments, laws that need changing and assorted social inequities, this one targeted the labor movement for abandoning its progressive principles. Ochs himself was not able to stay on course either, but his early work stands as a monument to those op-ed columnists of song, people who knew and believed things and made it their duty as soldiers of conscience to convince others. “Now it’s only fair to ask you boys, which side are you on?” sang Ochs. He might as well have been challenging the whole artistic community around him.

As silly as that question might sound to a 21st century pop performer, for whom choosing sides means shilling for either Coke or Pepsi, the Greenwich Village folk singers of the day were all, to one degree or another, on the left. (Ochs later etched the dividing line for ’60s political conviction in the scathing “Love Me, I’m a Liberal.”) Starting in 1963, as thousands of young people repeatedly gathered in Washington and other cities to speak out for civil rights and an end to the war in Vietnam, singers like Ochs, Tom Paxton, Pete Seeger, Odetta, Pat Sky, Eric Andersen, Judy Collins and Joan Baez took the podium and spread the news their way. They weren’t consciously positioning themselves as a marketing strategy, buying credibility with a little pro bono service to the cause, they were following through on the impulse that had drawn them to make music in the first place, building links on the chain fed them by Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson and others.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

“Links on the Chain” opens “The Best of Broadside 19621988,” five CDs of music from the recorded archives of Broadside, a magazine that began publishing the words and music of topical folk songs just as they were needed to fuel one of the great grass-roots political movements of the 20th century. A youthquake on a collision course with good old boys like Burl Ives and Theodore Bikel and button-down stylists like the Kingston Trio, intellectuals with guitars became the bards of conscience. Let Peter, Paul and Mary score the hits: Music’s acoustic missionaries were scribbling their news songs to change the world, not sell records.

Like many small publishing ventures, Broadside was a labor of love that could barely pay its bills (yet it eked out a two-decade existence, with a brief reprise). But idealists willing to sacrifice their lives for a worthy idea can accomplish a lot, and founders Sis Cunningham and the late Gordon Friesen never lost sight of their mission “to distribute … songs in which the ‘commercial music world’ had little or no interest.” They published the mimeographed magazine from a series of Manhattan apartments, where they hosted monthly visits by young songwriters eager to see their work in print. Supplicants, who included some of the greatest poets of a generation, would sing into the couple’s tape recorder and Cunningham would transcribe the best of them for the next month’s issue.

Soon, Broadside began releasing records, some made in real studios, others using the lo-fi apartment office archives. If the 89 songs that make up this collection come from diverse sources (and sound it), the simplicity of the music — anything involving more than a guitar and an untrained voice sticks out — keeps the audio inconsistency from being a distraction. You won’t have any problem hearing the voices here. You want to test your speakers? Get a Sting album.

Following the similar (but less topical) “Sing Out!” Broadside disseminated songs the way it had been done before records became the lingua franca. For 50 cents an issue, anyone could learn an evening’s worth of new tunes, with words from last week’s newspaper headlines and melodies that probably came from some old English ballad — as duly annotated in the box’s book-length liner notes, which also contain complete lyrics to every song and even the newspaper clippings that inspired them.

(I’ll leave the obvious preludes to hip-hop sampling and MP3 file sharing to any musicology or media student in need of a thesis topic. Help yourself. But be careful: In one of the set’s most affecting songs, “But If I Ask Them,” Sis Cunningham takes up the cause of Aunt Molly Jackson, an Appalachian woman whose songs were sung far and wide without bringing any relief to the harsh poverty of her life. “No one thought to wonder whose [song]/Here it was for them to use,” sings Cunningham. “The song became no longer mine.” Maybe Metallica should learn that one for the next Napster court hearing.)

Collectively, this music provides an unsentimental education about inconceivable catastrophes (“My Oklahoma Home [It Blowed Away],” “The Ballad of Martin Luther King”), monumental wrongs (racism, the nuclear threat, capitalist exploitation, the draft, the war, sexism) and courageous efforts to right them (like Paxton’s “Ain’t That News”). In our time, when knowledge of the past evaporates faster than instant messages on AOL, many of the subjects and events are so far off in the wasteland of times past that they might as well have never happened. Like the social crisis of interracial dating. The 15-year-old Janis Ian’s previously unreleased first recording (credited, as a Broadside in-joke on a Dylan alias, to “Blind Girl Grunt”) of “Society’s Child” is here, in a 1966 version titled “Baby, I’ve Been Thinking.” Of course, a climactic capitulation to prejudice makes it the only protest song in memory to give up and do the wrong thing (“One of these days … [things] must remain”). Maybe its true cultural value is for the endorsement of pass-the-buck irresponsibility.

The songs bring the forgotten past to enduring life. In “Ballad of William Worthy,” Ochs sings of a 1961 incident in which an American journalist was jailed upon his return from Castro’s Cuba, a place U.S. citizens were — and, technically, still are — barred from visiting. Writing before the birth of Elian Gonzalez’ parents, Ochs nails the entire absurdity of the government’s position in two lines: “It is strange to hear the State Department say/You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.” Peter La Farge’s tragic “Ballad of Ira Hayes” notes how selective America can be about its heroes; the resonant profile of a Native American later became a hit for Johnny Cash. Seeger, who to this day remains an unreconstructed protest singer, details an obscure and highly entertaining bit of history in Malvina Reynolds’ deliciously witty “Do as the Doukhobors Do.” Where else could you learn about five 19th century women, Russian immigrants to Canada, who expressed their objections to the nation’s educational policies by attending a speech by the prime minister in the buff?

“The Best of Broadside” is such a mother lode that beyond fine recordings of the era’s topical standards — Reynolds’ “What Have They Done to the Rain,” Seeger’s “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” Paxton’s “What Did You Learn in School Today,” Matthew Jones’ “Hell No, I Ain’t Gonna Go” — that many of the tracks that could have been omitted are still museum-quality, like “Song for Patty,” a sympathetic 1974 number about the kidnapping of Patty Hearst that sounds a lot like Dylan but is credited to one Sammy Walker. (Another Walker contribution, “Catcher in the Rye,” is even more Dylanesque. He also gets points for singing the version of Ochs’ loving Woody Guthrie tribute, “Bound for Glory,” here.) Ochs’ heart-wrenching “Changes,” a non-topical emotional outpouring that doesn’t really belong here, is included in a tender live version that could well serve as the era’s epilogue.

Even the post-dated songs warrant their place in such glorious company. Deborah Silverstein and the New Harmony Sisterhood Band’s “Draglines” defies its 1984 vintage with the finely woven harmonies of Celtic folk singing to lodge a strong, not strident, protest against strip mining. Although a dubious bow to star power would seem the only explanation for why Lucinda Williams’ “Lafayette,” a good-times travelogue that was indeed published in Broadside in 1979, is here, the liner notes make its inclusion out to be a courtesy to Cunningham. (Thankfully, Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” which Friesen thought enough of lyrically to put it in the magazine, did not receive equal consideration.)

The biggest star in Broadside’s pages, and for a time one of the magazine’s most ardent supporters, was a mysterious young Midwesterner with a Woody Guthrie fixation known, for contractual reasons (namely he had one or two elsewhere), as Blind Boy Grunt. While Bob Dylan’s literal presence in this set consists of two performances (“John Brown” and “Ballad of Donald White”) and four compositions sung by others, in a sense “The Best of Broadside” is all about him. His arrival, influence and departure from the topical song scene each made a crucial difference in the lives of these artists.

The earliest recording of a Dylan composition, a 1962 rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” by the New World Singers, is sung in the old way — handsomely, evenly, with idealism buoying what in the author’s own voice would bite and sneer with the dawning anger of a new generation. Seeger himself walks the line on a 1963 version of “Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” singing out with conviction but little emotion, letting Dylan’s lyrics speak for themselves in a way their clenched-jaw author never would.

Dylan, and all those influenced by him, quickly abandoned the traditional troubadour’s twinned faces of smiling good humor and dolorous tragedy to indict injustice and hypocrisy with cutting sarcasm, indignant anger and the obliterating belief that the world was about to change if they had anything to say about it. Then Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone” and pulled off his end-of-the-innocence electrification at Newport in the summer of ’65. (Seeger, making a famously myopic gaffe in an otherwise clear-eyed career, literally wanted to pull out the electric plug.) The folkies who loved him for singing about Hattie Carroll, Davey Moore and “Masters of War” saw him as a traitor, abandoning the righteous cause for something as trivial as artistic vision or, worse, commercial ambition. Whose back pages were those? Like hardcore punk rock years later, commercial marginalization wasn’t a hazard, it was a trademark of quality. If a lot of people liked you, how good could you be?

Dylan moved on, in part by honing the blade of sarcasm and irony that had been a tool of many a protest songwriter into a far more dangerous weapon. Humor, from bitter mockery to lighthearted amusement, was wielded well by protest singers, and this collection offers plenty of examples. Reynolds, who wrote, and here sings, the classic “Little Boxes,” a wry commentary on conformity and suburbia, finds urban decay just as rich. “The Faucets Are Dripping,” an anti-landlord screed, has witty couplets like “The reservoir’s drying, because it’s supplying/The faucets that drip in New York.” Peggy Seeger’s 1970 feminist work song, “Gonna Be an Engineer,” makes pointed fun of the clichis that kept women underpaid and underemployed. Ernie Marrs raised a stink at the time with the jocular irreverence of “Plastic Jesus,” but the Fugs (“Kill for Peace”) and others really pushed the limits of ironic detachment. (Check “The Willing Conscript,” Paxton’s deadpan depiction of a soldier asking to learn to kill and maim, sung here by Seeger.)

Given the subject matter, it took real poets to keep a straight face and not succumb to deadly earnestness or ineffectual anger. Paxton sings “Train for Auschwitz” (“The passengers condemned to die/But no crime have they done”) as if the Holocaust was news in 1963. Likewise, the piercing Canadian soprano Bonnie Dobson’s “Take Me for a Walk,” an anti-nuclear song also known as “Morning Dew,” sinks into glum ponderousness that could only be deflated by the ingenious sarcasm of Tom Lehrer, the singing Harvard math professor who kept a safe and apparently intentional distance from the folk movement. Even Ochs’ previously unreleased “Freedom Riders,” while as commendable in sentiment as any tune here, is blunt and amateurish. Leave it to the Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, a singing civil rights activist prominently featured on Disc Five, to let anger ring in the pseudo-spiritual “Nothing but His Blood,” an agit-prop singalong that couldn’t have failed to get fists pumping back in the day.

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

It’s August 1964. The late summer haze, how the Yankees are doing, cute beatnik girls I’ll never see again, a planned overnight trip to a nearby ski lodge and thoughts of the impending school year blow away as news filters into camp about the KKK’s brutal murders of three young Freedom Riders in Mississippi. Two of the victims were from New York, and a couple of the counselors knew one of them, Andy Goodman, pretty well.

We had sung the songs and knew the battle that was raging, but what we did not truly understand was how ordinary people, people we knew, were willing to die so that others they would never meet might move one step closer to freedom. The songs became personal and very, very real.

It’s April 1965. I’m in Washington, protesting the war with thousands of other new lefties (and my mom). We chant “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Judy Collins, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez sing. I run into kids I know from camp. We know that our fight is different than, say, the Freedom Riders, or the Wobblies, the early trade unionists or the victims of the HUAC blacklist, but we know it is also the same. We know all the words to their songs — they are our songs — and we sing them, proud and strong, guided by the belief that we are part of a chain and each song is a link in it.

As Freddy Krueger later observed, you can’t kill something that’s already dead. By the winter of ’69, rock was already flat-lining. If the bad news had yet to reach the front lines — and some might argue that it never has — the monument to virile youth the Stones helped erect only a few years earlier was an edifice about to be wrecked.

And, ironically enough, not by its sworn enemies or its craftiest exploiters. Not by MTV, hip-hop, the Internet or even Celine Dion. No, rock ‘n’ roll was done in by three well-intentioned nobodies who, to their credit, worked hard and believed in themselves. That their values ran counter to the counterculture might have left them on the outside looking in a year earlier, but the ’60s were ready for last call. That party had gone out of bounds with hard drugs and the discovery of death as a lifestyle and was facing a grim and uncertain morning after. The new-left politics rock had inadvertently fueled had diverged into feel-good Moratorium marchers and self-obsessed bombers. Stardom had corrupted musical idealists and left them easy prey for commercial interests. With Newtonian certainty, the great leap forward was ready for its about-face.

The world didn’t need any more fixing, at least not of the sort that had turned to mud at Woodstock. There was nothing to be nostalgic about, since youth culture needed to see its reflection, and the Elvis ’50s didn’t look familiar at all. The future was too hard to comprehend and far harder still to imagine shaping. No, what the world needed, in the eyes of those unaware of its possibilities, was the kind of fun that didn’t mean anything. As the social pendulum began its great swing back, Grand Funk Railroad rolled up to embody that know-nothing reactionary spirit and make it the soundtrack of the ’70s.

Grand Funk arose from Michigan’s working-class industrial fug around the same time as the Stooges, but their garage-bred ineptitude was a completely different American breed. The Stooges were bad seeds, pollution-fueled aliens who had abandoned life’s assembly line to make music of enormously negative appeal as they accelerated blindly toward a personal hell. Ugly and depraved, unsophisticated but knowledgeably honoring some worthy predecessors, these vicious bohemians fit into the cultural fabric like cigarette holes in a couch. Their clothes and demeanor, if at all conscious, were not meant to help them fit in but to stand out, to inflict whatever offense was still possible in a time of great moral decay.

Grand Funk were Nixon’s silent majority, living proof that long hair and loud music signified nothing more than the Prez muttering “Sock it to me” on “Laugh-In.” Arriving on the scene too late to grasp rock’s pivotal role in shaping the ’60s, they observed a landscape of no-account hippies, foreign influence and dissipating idealism and didn’t like what they saw. (The braless chicks, drugs and ready cash were another story.) Unlike the sissies and bookworms who had found rock ‘n’ roll their court of last resort, Mark, Don and Mel were hard, simple and strong — macho moral descendants of John Wayne and Billy Jack — and they knew their country needed them. Owing nothing to history, unashamed of their shortcomings and undaunted by their obstacles, they suited up and got to work. Though hardly in the same league, they shrewdly fashioned themselves a power trio after Cream, who conveniently dissolved just in time.

Others could lock themselves away, spending unconscionable amounts of time in the studio making grandiose art-rock of increasing intricacy and technical reach; Grand Funk displayed the rugged efficiency of line workers. These get-it-done types released two albums in each of their first four years, paving the way for cynics like the equally unselfconscious Kiss, who also knew to keep striking while the iron was on fire.

In addition to a career-launching appearance at the Atlanta Pop Festival a month before Woodstock, Grand Funk released two albums in 1969 and began their inexorable plod to superstardom. Released only weeks after Altamont, their second long-player, “Grand Funk Railroad,” is a textbook classic of sweat-rock, a lumbering collection of clichis played with the conviction of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and the mindless determination of Rocky Balboa leaking blood on the canvas. Whereas the Stooges presumably noticed the vast chasm between their work and the sound of young America — and thought themselves the better for it — Grand Funk comically gave it their best shot with quavering vocals, grunting bass and high-school guitar licks. And they were richly rewarded.

With three additional decades of rock history to consider, their ineptitude can be forgiven. After all, punk couldn’t have happened if instrumental ability were a prerequisite. But lack of skill has to be mortgaged against some brilliant idea or at least a clever novelty. The members of Grand Funk, God love ‘em, didn’t have an original bone in their body. They went from being puppets of an autocratic manager to willing servants of strong producers like Todd Rundgren without ever demonstrating a shred of individual creativity. Their best work, save for the dumb-luck power of “We’re an American Band,” came via covers of classics like “The Loco-Motion” or “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and uncredited borrowings like the Ten Years After chorus (“Love Like a Man”) in Grand Funk’s subsequent “Walk Like a Man.” The significance of their merciless decimation of “Gimme Shelter,” the Stones song for which the Maysles named their documentary film of the dismal doings at Altamont, however, is too dense to contemplate. No, GFR were hopelessly bad singers and players, but success calls its own tune, and their unmitigated shittiness became an acceptable ’70s benchmark.

With the green-eyed gods of commerce on their side, Grand Funk sold an unheard-of 10 million albums within two years. And that was that. Critics could carp all they wanted, but it was a new decade and a new generation had spoken. The ’60s suddenly felt like a pitifully naive oasis, preschool for the big boys. In the wake of Grand Funk’s jolly thuggery, the era they had wiped away felt like it might have been a mass hallucination, and rock was revealed to be just another cynical American industry, free of social consequence and solidly status quo. Flag burners be damned — the irony-impaired Grand Funk posed nude in a barnyard full of flags and made it look respectful.

The success of Grand Funk dragged rock back to earth from its wildest imaginings, as if the space program had been taken over by McDonald’s and NASA’s rocketry breakthroughs converted to broil burgers. In their clumsiness, Grand Funk inadvertently knocked down the wall that had divided rock self-expression from market-driven factory pop. Shorn of its pretensions and dreams, its politics and its effeminacy, rock entered Have a Nice Day hell, the vapid wasteland of the early ’70s in which musical styles became random buttons on the Top 40 jukebox. While Britain’s teens embraced the future in platform heels and eye shadow, Americans would go years before rediscovering music’s artistic and cultural ambitions.

But, in their own minds, Grand Funk were ready to save America. Weighing in late on the Vietnam saga (14 months before the signing of the Paris peace accords, as it happens), they declared, “People, Let’s Stop the War” on 1971′s “E Pluribus Funk,” reducing years of protest against the military-industrial complex to three incoherent lines: “If we had a president that did just what he said/The country would be just alright and no one would be dead/From fighting in a war that causes big men to get rich.” On the same album, which is the most outspoken for singer-guitarist-songwriter Mark Farner, “Save the Land” warns, “Look out for the land rush … /All we’ve got is just the land/Take a stand, save the land.” More typical of the group’s spiritual concerns is the unbridled passion of “Heartbreaker,” a minor hit released in early 1970: “Heartbreaker/Can’t take her/Heartbreaker/Bringin’ me down.”

Critics raked them over the coals, but Grand Funk had the last laugh. Victory was theirs, no matter how many pussies with pens proclaimed that they sucked. Their sales as much as their sensibilities cleared a path to football stadiums, where rock, sports and other testosterone-fueled mass gatherings could finally meld into one universal crud culture. That would lead to even worse things. (Maybe you don’t care that rock songs have become “jock classics” or that hawkers vend hot dogs in the stands at Pink Floyd shows, but I do.) Farner went on to become a survivalist and born-again Christian. In the liner notes to the band’s “Thirty Years of Funk” box set, he writes, “Just for the record, I despise the men and women who under the influence of darkness have compromised the sovereignty of the People of the United States.” Can you spell W-A-C-O?

There have been far worse bands than Grand Funk Railroad, but try to imagine what might have happened if it had been, say, Melanie who had been able to outsell the Beatles at Shea Stadium. That would have fixed rock’s male paradigm, wouldn’t it? What Grand Funk did was establish banality as a mass-market ideal, inverting the idealism that had once driven artists to strive for creative progress, testing and shedding styles like babies learning to walk. For a brief, exciting time, rock could not bear to stand still, and its greats were those who constantly sought new challenges. Between 1966 and 1969, it was swept by waves of psychedelia, sitar, folk, blues, country and more. The arrival of Grand Funk stopped progress dead in its tracks. Ill-suited to do more than sweat, stomp and sell, they were neither capable of, nor inclined to, advance. By the time they got out of the way, ushered into the past tense by two albums that tanked, the latter having been produced by Frank Zappa (bless his bearded little head), the ’70s were more than half over. As if on cue, the Ramones were counting it down on the Bowery, and it was time to begin again.