If there was any justice, you would hear Bobby Bland on the radio at night. Especially on the car radio, when you were driving long stretches on highways that were new to you but looked familiar all the same. Past neon cocktail glasses and buzzing vacancy signs on beat-up motels where patrons choose to park around in back and everyone is registered under some novel name. His is the music of desire and regret, gaudy and permanent, like a tattoo of some woman’s name whose face you can hardly recall.
As the show-biz name he has worn and discarded will tell you, Bobby “Blue” Bland sings the blues, but that doesn’t really do him justice. Though he began as one of many Roy Brown imitators, shouting his way through the jump blues, he grew closer to — and further from — a true blues singer. In a number of remarkable songs (“Cry, Cry, Cry,” “I Pity the Fool,” “Turn on Your Love Light,” “Lead Me On”) recorded primarily in the 1950s and ’60s, Bland invented a sound that felt both unique and downright lived-in.
While the horn-driven Joe Scott arrangements that buoyed Bland’s work formed a natural bridge between the big band sound of the ’40s and the soul revues of the ’60s, there was something odd and angst-ridden about the tales they told. Beneath titles as lurid as pulp fiction paperbacks (“Woke Up Screaming,” “A Million Miles From Nowhere”), penned by anonymous artists under the single moniker of Deadric Malone (an arrangement that allowed Bland’s manager, Don Robey, to pocket all the proceeds), were songs that snuck in just under the curtain of kitsch. They were songs written in lipstick on bar napkins, found beneath half-empty glasses in roadside taverns. While Bland’s singing owed something to crooners like Tony Bennett and Perry Como, the sound was rougher — and just slightly removed. It was, as one of his early ’60s songs had it, “Two Steps From the Blues.”
Of course, there is no justice, and you won’t hear Bobby Bland on the radio, or much of anywhere, really. You are more likely to hear some white band covering one of his tunes. Eric Clapton is still performing “Farther up the Road,” the Grateful Dead used to close their early San Francisco shows with “Turn on Your Love Light” (Pigpen McKernan was no great singer, but the band’s two-drum attack owed something to blues revues) and the Band paid homage with “Share Your Love With Me.”
But Bland is still going strong. Despite bouts with drink, drugs and depression — not to mention a triple bypass in 1995 — he performed over 100 shows last year. (That’s down from the 300 gigs a year that was his standard for decades.) A fair amount of his work remains in print (the best of it captured on three double-CD packages from his day on the Duke label), he still records for the Malaco label (a sort of living Smithsonian for blues musicians) and he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And like some roadhouse Sisyphus, he seems by and large resigned to the life he has chosen.
“Oh, it gets kind of tiresome sometimes,” he told Peter Guralnick back in 1979, “but you get a schedule and you just go and do your work. Because, really, that’s what’s paying the bills.”
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“One month from the day I first met you/Your promises proved to be untrue
Step by step, I’ve been a fool/That’s why I’m two steps from the blues.”
The cover of Bland’s 1961 album “Two Steps From the Blues” is a work of art, a Mondrian in black and blue. It’s a color photograph of the singer standing in front of a one-story building at the bottom of, yes, two steps. His pants are gray, his shirt is black. His coat is thrown over his shoulder, Sinatra style, and dark glasses hide his eyes from the sunlight. The building that represents “the blues” is paneled in squares of blue and white — you would think it was his hotel room except his name appears on one of the panels, as if he were perpetually playing there. (Talk about bringing your work home with you.) In fact, the only thing that isn’t black or blue or white in the photo is Bobby Bland’s brown skin.
The road that brought Bland to this place of perpetual emotion began in the South and crisscrossed the country, six nights a week. The singer was born Robert Calvin Bland on Jan. 27, 1930, in the little town of Rosemark, Tenn., just outside of Memphis. He quit school in the third grade and remains practically illiterate today. He speaks in a garbled syntax at times, and is suspicious of talk he doesn’t understand.
“I didn’t like to work much, but I got a job at Bender’s Garage, which was $27 a week,” Bland told Guralnick in what remains the definitive piece about the singer (collected in “Lost Highway”). “And I started to sing on weekends. Spirituals. Just a small amount of it. We called ourselves the Pilgrim Travelers after a group that was big at the time. Then I started hanging around Beale Street with a bunch of guys. They used to give an amateur show down by the park at the Palace Theater every Wednesday night. Naturally we came to call ourselves the Beale Streeters.”
Those guys — Johnny Ace, B.B. King, Roscoe Gordon, Earl Forrest — were playing for free in the late ’40s. Heavily influenced by guitarist T-Bone Walker, they were forging a blues style that would define the next couple of decades. And what they were doing did not go unnoticed. Bland’s first recording (backed by Gordon) was produced by Sam Phillips and later released on Chess records. In 1952, four songs produced by Ike Turner appeared on the Los Angeles-based Modern label. The man had something — these blues mavens could smell it — and in 1953 he signed to the Duke label, then owned by Memphis DJ David James Mattis.
Almost immediately, Bland was drafted, and he celebrated by recording the mournful “Army Blues” (“Uncle Sam done got me/That is the awful news”). After a two-and-a-half year stint, Bland returned to civilian life to find that the Duke label had been sold to Houston music entrepreneur Don Robey — a Mephistophelean character who would define Bland’s life and career, for good and ill, over the next two decades.
Half-black and half-Jewish, Robey came from Houston’s middle-class black community. He had dropped out of high school and hustled a living gambling and running a taxi business before stumbling into the music business. He promoted concerts and ran a record store in the ’30s and ’40s, where he doubtless got a good look at the seamier aspects of the racket. His gospel label, Peacock, recorded such legendary acts as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Mighty Clouds of Joy. In 1952 he merged the label with Duke and doubled his roster, crossing into secular territory with such popular Duke acts as Ace (who achieved immortality playing Russian roulette on Christmas Eve, 1954), Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and the relatively untested Bland.
History has not been kind to Robey. While some apologists note the difficulties a black man must have faced running his own label (10 years before Berry Gordy), most musical historians tend to dwell on Robey’s pugnacious nature and sheer greed. Typical are the remarks of Francis Davis, who in “The History of the Blues” limns Robey as “a 100 percent sleazeball,” and adds, “as if claiming co-composer credit for most of his performers’ songs wasn’t bad enough, he also threatened them with bodily harm or death when they objected.”
While Davis characterizes Bland as “one of Robey’s field hands,” the singer has a different outlook. “There’s some people that told me the best thing for me is go to the country and getcha plow and mule,” he told a reporter in 1999. When pressed on Robey’s shady business practices (there is scant evidence that the entrepreneur contributed as much as one line to the songs he took credit for), the singer demurred. “Well, he’s in business. Each company that you get with does the same thing. But Robey did a lot of people a lot of favors — me, for one, gettin’ a chance to record.”
A chance to record and a chance to define himself. Pairing the singer with producer-arranger Joe Scott and band leader Bill Harvey proved an act of genius. Of Scott, Bland says simply, “I’d say he was everything.” He was like Nelson Riddle to Bland’s Frank Sinatra, creating a landscape in which the singer’s complex, vibrant tones could play while reining him in with rhythm. Working with Scott, Bland learned phrasing and timing, and to this day the singer can do more with a simple lyric — racing it like a motorbike one minute, toying with it like a yo-yo the next — than almost any blues singer you can name. If Robey was Bobby Bland’s serpent, Joe Scott was his apple.
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Bland’s early outings on Duke were riveting, if not exactly groundbreaking. “It’s My Life, Baby” (1955) could have been done by Muddy Waters (no small praise). It’s exciting even now: Roy Gaines’ electric guitar slices though the rolling horns like a hot knife through butter, and Bland’s vocal exudes the kind of dick-swinging confidence that was the staple of most blues singers. The lyric (attributed to Robey and “Ferdinand Washington”) was rather tongue-in-cheek, while foreshadowing the singer’s future problems: “Well you’re always tellin’ people I drink too much/but everytime I get a bottle you add your little touch.”
Other early hits gave scarcely a glimpse of the sensitive-guy persona Bland would later perfect. The 1956 “You’ve Got Bad Intentions,” another roadhouse blues, contains this put-down: “You say you can’t go on living/If you can’t be by my side/Gonna send you a bottle of poison/Please commit suicide.” (Well, he did say please.)
Bland was developing the formula for his ultimate success (a success that would yield more than 30 Top 20 R&B singles) even as he was breaking through with a familiar blues sound. “If Bland’s greatest natural gift was his ability to make even his shouts sound intimate, his genius (or Robey’s) was in realizing that women bought blues records, too,” wrote Davis. Photos of Bland performing in the ’50s testify: Women reach out to touch the hem of his sharkskin garment while the singer — a big man with a croissant of a nose and an ungainly, “Eraserhead” pomp — caresses the microphone like a lover. He left the rambling-guy songs to other singers; Bobby “Blue” Bland wanted to stick around and talk about love.
“It was ’57 before I got a style of my own,” the singer said years later. “Well, I was listening to Franklin a lot at the time — that’s Reverend C.L. Franklin, Aretha’s daddy — ‘The Eagle Stirreth His Nest’ — and that’s where I got my squall from. After I had lost the high falsetto. You see, I had to get some other kind of gimmick, you know, to be identified with.”
If “the Squall” — a honking, throat-clearing verbal tic that sounds at times like a prelude to cardiac arrest — was taken straight from the church, so were other aspects of Bobby Bland’s act. “You could go out on Saturday night and have a ball,” he told Guralnick, “but on Sunday church was a must.” Lyrics were inspired by gospel songs and scripture; “Yield not to temptation (while I’m gone),” he commanded in one song, while “You’re the One” twisted a familiar lyric thusly:
“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen/Nobody knows but you.”
For in the songs that Bland sang — songs specifically crafted for his act — there is always a sense of identification with another. It is not the loneliness of one he sings about but the loneliness of two. “You know how it feels,” he sang in the epic 1959 song “Lead Me On,” “you understand/What it is to be a stranger/In this unfriendly land.” Here the singer plays both Orpheus and Eurydice, reaching out a hand to lead and be rescued, simultaneously.
Is it any wonder the women all went ape-shit for Bobby “Blue” Bland? While most blues singers were dusting their broom or throwing their women out the door, Bland was embracing commitment. He made responsibility sound downright sexy. Between 1959 and 1963, with a series of hits with titles like “I’ll Take Care of You”, “Don’t Cry No More” and “That’s the Way Love Is,” Bland brought the blues into the bedroom and paved the way for the seductive sounds of soul. His influence could be heard in the later recordings of crossover artists like Otis Redding and Sam Moore, and even white boys like Welshman Tom Jones.
But try and hear Bobby “Blue” Bland …
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“Without a warning, you broke my heart/You took it darlin’ and you tore it apart
You left me sitting in the dark crying/You said your love for me was dying.” — “Turn On Your Love Light,” 1961
Bland saw some crossover success himself with songs like “Turn on Your Love Light,” a great tune that could be a blueprint for many of his best records. The jubilee-style big-brass opening sets up the listeners’ expectations for something happy — until Bland’s big baritone comes in and cuts the melody off at the knees. By the time he hits the chorus, beseeching his fickle lover — “Turn on your light! Let it shine on me!” — the song has moved right back into church even as two drummers jive with the singer. It is a supremely sad song in an almost joyous setting, and the tension these conflicting forces create is still breathtaking.
But for all his successes, Bland was not getting rich. With label-mate Junior Parker he toured constantly (under the banner “Blues Consolidated”), staying loyal to Robey even as friends pointed out that he was getting ripped off. “I’ve had several offers, you know,” he told Jim and Amy O’Neal in the periodical Living Blues, “but this was the first offer that really got me out of the gutter, was Duke label. So I feel more or less partial to the company.”
Throughout the ’60s, Bland continued to tour beneath the radar of most white audiences. “I played the chitlin circuit,” he said, “black only. I have my own people to thank for keeping me out here this long. They the only ones who had a chance to hear me.”
While former band-mate (and onetime boss) B.B. King conquered rock arenas, Bland remained largely in obscurity (even as white stars like Boz Scaggs and Van Morrison touted his work). Perhaps it was because he didn’t play an instrument, or write his own songs. Like country’s George Jones, Bland was the instrument, a living embodiment of all he sang about. Any other ax would have been played out by now. Even as his phrasing bespoke a greater sophistication, the emotion beneath it was hard won. Asked in a concert interview in 1998 about his influences, Bland commented, “Nat King Cole for the diction. The feeling came from disappointments and what have you.”
What Bland had, among other things, was a monumental drinking problem. “I was an alcoholic for 18 years,” he told Guralnick. “The reason I can say it is because I know it happened.” While he boasted of never missing a gig, “I was drinking up to about three fifths a day, man. I’m just so happy that I found out that I don’t have to do that no more, that’s why I can talk about it now.”
Not surprisingly, Bland’s drinking bottomed out about the same time his career did. In 1968, after more than a decade of solid touring, Joe Scott left, never to collaborate with Bland again. His replacement, Mel Jackson, still leads the band in the Scott style much as a series of guitarists (most notably Wayne Bennett) traded licks with Bland in a call-and-response dialogue style derived from T-Bone Walker. (On numbers such as “Stormy Monday Blues” and “Black Night,” Bennett sounds like the singer’s conscience, an empty bottle and a broken heart all at once.) But the end of the Scott-Bland union signaled a sea change in the singer’s career.
Bland quit drinking in 1971, Two years later, ABC-Dunhill bought the Duke label and released a duet of “comeback” albums (though, in fact, Bland had never gone anywhere), “His California Album” (1973) and “Dreamer” (1974). By relying on such studio stalwarts as guitarist Larry Carlton and material made popular by others — “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” “I’ve Got to Use My Imagination” — the records brought him to a wider audience without breaking any new ground. His collaborations with B.B. King (“Together for the First Time,” 1974, and “Together Again,” 1976) also proved popular, if rather uninspired.
Through it all he kept working, touring, recording. He divorced his wife Marty in the ’70s and now travels with Willie Mae, his wife of 20 years. After moving to Malaco Records in 1984, Bland found himself playing more dates off the chitlin circuit. It was about then that I saw him at the San Francisco Blues Festival, an annual event held on a vast lawn in the city’s pristine Marina district. Even as band leader Joe Hardin tried to warm up the crowd by telling them anyone can have the blues, the atmosphere put the lie to his testimony. Chinese kites sailed in a cloudless sky as below, while white blues fans tried to decide which microbrew to try next.
Bland’s set was rather perfunctory, and the vaunted squall was more of an annoyance than anything else: Most of the time it sounded like he was going to spit on the Frisbee-tossing crowd. But down in the middle a group of black women were hollering like an amen choir, waving hats and scarves at the singer who beseeched them to remember him “late in the midnight hour, when you don’t have your main squeeze around.”
In 1992, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; in 1998 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Blues Foundation. (Before the ceremony, held at Dan Ackroyd’s House of Blues in Los Angeles, Bland and his party had to wait outside while the management found passes for them.) That same year, Malaco filmed Bland in concert back on Beale Street; the videotape (“The Night, the Street, the Man”) shows the singer in fine fellow, three years after his heart surgery.
Slow and stately in a three-piece white suit, sporting a diamond pinkie ring as big as the Ritz, Bland appears unbowed by four decades of hard living. Some of the higher notes have been replaced by a pained whisper, and he takes a stool almost immediately, handing his bow tie to his valet (a job he once performed for King and Junior Parker).
The folks in the audience, including fellow blues veterans Johnny Taylor and Otis Rush, treat him like it’s old home week, shouting during his act. They go crazy when the valet hands him a black handkerchief as he launches into “I Pity the Fool,” and cheer perversely when he announces, “It seems like my luck’s been running bad here lately.”
It’s a good set, tight but not by-the-numbers, though Bland never looks completely at ease. Maybe it’s the cameras, catching his every move; maybe it’s the floral arrangements at the front of the stage that create a barrier between him and his fans. Whatever it is, his eyes betray a certain wariness as he sings the funereal “St. James Infirmary” for the millionth time. That’s a song about seeing your lover dying — the ultimate break-up — but Bobby “Blue” Bland keeps right on living.
I’ve seen that look in his eyes before, in an old photograph collected in Robert Palmer’s “Rock & Roll: An Unruly History.” Behind a shuttered motel, Bland and some of Duke’s men are gathered on a break between shows on the chitlin circuit. The hair is conked, the rings are big. Junior Parker seems to be licking his fingers while the other men are all jiving and laughing at some unseen joke. Only Bland, hunkered down in the center, looks like he’s ready for the worst. His focus is somewhere behind the camera, and his hat is in his hand as he tries to stay just a few steps ahead of oblivion.
In what was no doubt intended as a modest proposal, Los Angeles Times Op-Ed page editor Michael Kinsley last week suggested a bit of kinder, gentler political TV to salve the wounds of our fractious times. After tweaking Jon Stewart for taking himself too seriously when he appeared on CNN’s “Crossfire,” Kinsley, a former “Crossfire” commentator himself, made his pitch (one he claims that CNN and others have declined).
“The idea, in a word, ‘Cease-Fire,’” wrote Kinsley, who edited Slate and the New Republic before joining the Times. “You get your politicians or your experts or your interest-group representatives, and instead of poking them with a stick to widen their disagreement, you nudge and bully and cajole them toward some kind of common ground. It sounds goody-goody, I know, but the intention would be more Judge Judy than Bill Moyers.”
In television, alas, the road to ratings hell is paved with goody-goody intentions (imagine Judge Judy Woodruff). While Stewart was probably right when he said that the right-left, Jib-Jab formula of “Crossfire” was “hurting America,” he is probably mistaken if he thinks its viewers hunger for a more elevated level of discourse. While record numbers of viewers tuned into the generally substance-laden presidential debates, with the third one beating the baseball playoffs nationwide, fans of shows like “Crossfire” seem every bit as partisan as the show’s hosts. They’re guys (mostly) who find C-SPAN too wonky but Fox News too one-sided. They aren’t interested in elevating the level of discourse. On “Crossfire,” it’s all about the level of discord — and audiences want to turn it up to 11.
Let’s go to the tape for a show that aired Nov. 5.
Tucker Carlson: “Three days after the presidential election, it is clear that it was not the war on terror, but the issue of what we’re calling moral values that drove President Bush and other Republicans to victory this week. In the end, in other words, most Democrats just don’t want Barbra Streisand in charge of their lives. [Laughter] Democrats had no idea.”
Paul Begala: “Well, Democrats do need to do a better job of talking about their values. But shouldn’t Republicans do a better job of actually living by theirs?” [Cheering and applause] “If I hear one more, one more, sanctimonious Republican working on his third divorce lecture me about my values, I’m going to smack him.”
Yeah, baby! And that was from one of our guys. While “Crossfire” was mildly annoying back in Kinsley’s day (when he locked lances with such neocon Orcs as Morton Kondracke), it now resembles nothing more than World Wrestling Entertainment’s popular “Smackdown.” Heroes and villains are invoked by both sides to predictable audience reaction: Hillary gets hisses on the right, Ashcroft guarantees catcalls from the left (I doubt Alberto Gonzales will garner the same sort of reaction, but give him time). Bad guys and good guys alike commit blatant fouls — mentioning Viagra whenever Bob Dole comes up; reminding viewers why Bush had the Oval Office cleaned so thoroughly after Clinton. It’s all the equivalent of hitting your opponent with a metal folding chair, and the audience loves it.
The guys on the right even have their own costumes: Robert Novak has been sporting that black suit and grisly demeanor for so long his nickname should be The Undertaker. (If only the name weren’t already taken by a longtime wrestling villain, “the innovator of Inferno Matches, Casket Matches, and, of course, the famed Hell in the Cell,” according to the WWE site.) Kid Carlson, with his bowtie and mop-top, plays youthful ward to Novak’s dark prince, trying hard to do the unflappable thing that Silent Bob learned from Darth Vader, though The Kid too often seems to get his suspenders in a bunch.
As pure theater, the Democratic side doesn’t fare as well. Sure, James Carville has an irascible persona familiar to voters and viewers alike (dyslexic, dyspeptic and sometimes quite funny) and he even comes with a handle, The Ragin’ Cajun, which CNN employed in a lame attempt to hype the show in the manner of a boxing card this summer. But he doesn’t have an outfit. And he’s married to a Republican, a high priestess in the church of Cheney at that, which to me would be like learning that Eliot Ness played cards with Frank Nitti. And poor Paul Begala doesn’t seem to have anything going for him. He looks exactly like what he is, a Democratic apparatchik (both he and Carville worked for Clinton and later advised the Kerry campaign — and look where that got the senator), and has no nickname that I know of. Plus he lets Tucker get under his skin, acting more peevish than his old boss on the South Beach diet.
But if “Crossfire” and its ilk are becoming more like professional wrestling in terms of temperament if not entertainment value, they offer no threat in the audience department. “Smackdown” and its sibling, “Raw,” regularly draw 4 to 5 million cable viewers, while Jon Stewart’s visit to “Crossfire” garnered 867,000 viewers — the biggest episode of the show’s season. (Web downloads of video of the “Daily Show” host’s 2-on-1 with Carlson and Begala were close to a million.) Of course, it doesn’t help that “Crossfire” is aired at 4:30 p.m. EST, guaranteeing an audience of the marginally employed. In order to ratchet up the excitement, the show is now taped before a live audience at George Washington University — though a glimpse of the audience reveals a lot of them to be a little old for school. And they’re certainly not learning anything.
Aficionados of political theater may be tempted to look to William F. Buckley Jr.’s weekly political program, “Firing Line” (1966-2000), in which the archconservative parried with a host of largely left-wing guests, for an antecedent. But Buckley, who played John the Baptist to Reagan and much of the neocon movement, had a certain oily charm. A Psychology Today poll taken in the early ’70s found a huge sampling of women had fantasies about Buckley while having sex with their husbands (I think it was his tongue).
But the God-man of Yale generally engaged in something we would recognize as debate. He would ask his guests questions about their positions and usually had the decency of letting them answer. He seldom lost it with his guests (Gore Vidal being the most famous exception) and one could come away from the program feeling they had heard an issue argued from at least two sides.
In sheer bellicosity, “Crossfire” now owes more to the long-running syndicated gab fest “The McLaughlin Group,” which many still associate with the “Saturday Night Live” parody in which Dana Carvey, as host John McLaughlin, would ask guests questions like “What did I have for breakfast?” only to shout over their reply: “Wrong!” But compared to “Crossfire,” the real “McLaughlin Group” seems positively genteel as regular panelists such as the Democratic Lawrence O’Donnell and the Republican Tony Blankley politely wait for each other to finish before disagreeing.
The trend to turn up the decibels is an obvious nod to the ratings success of Fox shouter (and after-hours phone monologist) Bill O’Reilly. On “Crossfire,” hosts and guests alike are forced to smile while calling each other naove Pollyannas and fascist bootjacks. They step on each other’s lines and shake their heads at their opponent’s inability to grasp even simple facts. For all the ways it resembles pro wrestling, though, “Crossfire” is still no “Smackdown.”
Fans of “Smackdown” know that each character has a back story, a mentor, a finishing move. Most intriguingly, they can cross over to the other side at will. Take “Raw” superstar Triple H (Hunter Hearst Helmsley) aka The Game aka the Cerebral Assassin. After a brief period in which he fought on the side of niceness, “The Game’s true colors came shining through and he has once again found himself listening to the fans’ jeers,” according to his WWE bio. “To further solidify the fact that he doesn’t care about the fans, Triple H aligned himself with ‘the dirtiest player in the game,’ Ric Flair, Randy Orton and Batista. Together, they called themselves Evolution.”
Are you listening, Begala? You know how those red-state hicks feel about evolution; I think you could steal this one wholesale and no one would be the wiser. Imagine Tucker’s mashed-in face when you deliver a pump-handle slam on his supine person. Of course his bow tie could start spinning in a defensive maneuver, blowing pixie dust into your eyes while the Undertaker sneaks up behind you and throws you into a coffin, cackling, “How do you feel about the right to die now?” That’s when a trap door could open and the Ragin’ Cajun could appear to the strains of “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya-Ya,” carrying a flaming skull.
Alas, “Crossfire” will never be so entertaining. But that’s not because its audience wouldn’t get it or the network wouldn’t allow it. With those kinds of numbers (the show averages a little over 600,000 viewers without Stewart) they could afford to play with the format. Holding down that spot between “Inside Politics” and “Wolf Blitzer” doesn’t exactly make them the linchpin in CNN’s afternoon schedule. So why not go all the way? Don the tights and jump into the ring.
Folks in Georgia (CNN’s ancestral home) understand the message behind the admonishment “eat a peach,” even if they are referring to the Allman Brothers. Get messy and chomp on the pit. Audiences of “Crossfire” and its ilk don’t want reason. They want to whoop and holler at the red-meat lines, like the yahoos who threw rotten vegetables at the figure of Abraham Lincoln that appeared in the stage version of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in “The Gangs of New York.” They don’t want tuna with good taste. They want the taste of blood when “Crossfire” offers cherry soda. The show may be hurting America, but trust me, Jon, America wants the hurt.
It all began when my daughter’s friend Catherine moved to the Midwest. Catherine and Franny, my 10-year-old, had been friends since they were babies, and the decision of Catherine’s parents to leave New York — brought about in part by Sept. 11 — was traumatic for both girls. Besides, Catherine was a New York kid. What would they make of her in Minnesota?
Catherine had her own answer to that. When she came to visit us a few months into the school year, her look had completely changed. Gone was the generic Gap and Old Navy garb of before. Though only 11, she was now wearing a plaid miniskirt, striped stockings and a little black shirt adorned with a tragic looking kewpie doll — imagine a bobble-head with a Laura Petrie do — called Oopsy Daisy and the message “Oops, I Went Goth!”
Musically, goth has always been sort of like punk’s sick little sister. While punk snuck out at night and smashed your parents’ car, goth was at home setting things on fire. Punk liked speed; goth preferred absinthe. But both were joined by a certain cynicism and disdain for what our president might call “traditional values” — and certainly good grooming. While punk has splintered into myriad musical shards — from the pop punks who groove to radio-friendly bands like Good Charlotte and A Simple Plan to spiritual punks who listen to straight edge groups — goth is still best represented by bands like Bauhaus and the Cure.
But the goth (and, to a lesser extent, punk) fashions favored by kids today don’t necessarily have anything to do with the music (just as goth-looking bands like the Grammy-winning Evanescence don’t have much to do with goth). It’s a look — deathly pallor, black everything — that can be traced back to Wednesday Addams and Winona Ryder’s character in “Beetlejuice.” It’s a look that put the fun back in funereal, and after making the rounds on high school campuses for decades, it’s filtered down to the preteen set. Aggressively antisocial and unhealthy looking, goth provides a uniform for those determined not to blend in. And the gloomy outlook it evokes (“My whole life is a dark room!” complains Winona’s character in “Beetlejuice”) speaks to the black moods of puberty.
Catherine’s mother, Betsy, says her daughter’s look was a way of defining herself in this new environment. “At the end of the day,” says Betsy, “all the kids come off the bus in their shades of pastel and there’s the kid in black.” While she has not inspired others to follow her through the gates of hell, neither has Catherine’s look alienated her from her peers or her family. After six months in the fifth grade she was given something called the Friendship Award (it is Minnesota), and Mom and Dad, while prohibiting anything too extreme, are supportive of her new style. “I’m proud of her for being willing to live out loud,” says Betsy, and, like any good parent, she’s more concerned with how her daughter behaves than how she looks. Still, she adds, there are limits: “No belly shirts, no bras showing, no fishnets and, except for lip gloss, no makeup.”
Catherine’s example made an impression on my daughter, and within a few weeks of her friend’s visit Franny was clamoring for clothes featuring Emily the Strange and timorously trying on snap-on studs and dog collars. When did all this merchandising of goth and punk paraphernalia start targeting little girls? I wasn’t haunted by the specter of Marilyn Manson and the Columbine kids, Middle America’s nightmare of the ’90s: I knew too many authentically nice kids who looked like Hellboy. And I wasn’t worried about the look sticking, either; in middle school in the ’60s, I had gone for Carnaby Street gear only to switch to work shirts and jeans in high school. It’s the sense of disconnection I feel seeing my little girl trying on an older look and attitude. Franny still inhabits a world where her pets are more important than petting, and I can’t escape the style’s echoes of sex and death.
Not that I have anything against sex and death. (They are, in fact, two of my principal preoccupations.) I just don’t like to think about them in the context of my daughter. Especially when she’s 10 years old.
If youth cries for anything, it is the authentic. From Young Werther to Holden Caulfield, from “Rebel Without a Cause” to “The Gilmore Girls,” adolescents throughout history have disdained the phony and clamored for the true.
Punk was supposed to be true — the no-bullshit alternative to bloated prog rock and self-satisfied consumerism. (That punk became commercialized itself was prophesied in Joe Strummer’s dictum: “He who fucks nuns will later join the church.”) To a young punk in the late ’70s, there was no graver insult than the ubiquitous “Poser!” And posers were everywhere, from musicians who introduced jazz chords to their songs, to the yuppies who wore skinny ties and danced to the Knack.
I was not exactly hardcore myself. Living in San Francisco then, single and reasonably unfettered, I found the punk scene to be the most fun thing going, and spent evenings at such local haunts as the Mabuhay Gardens and the Deaf Club, listening to S.F.’s (mostly lame) local bands while awaiting the return of such heroes as the Clash and the Ramones. Punk elevated both cynicism and passion, and I remember pursuing a lot of pleasures for no reason but kicks — authentic kicks, of course. For all that, punk remains the classic soundtrack of youth.
But not 10-year-old youth! Forget about the sex and drugs, if you can. Punk embraced contempt and affected a world-weariness that I think are well and proper when in your 20s, maybe even in your teens. I feel like an old scold saying, “My daughter’s too young to be that cynical!” and I realize I’m experiencing the feelings of denial common to all parents who watch in alarm as their children grow, with the added protectiveness a father feels for his girl. But I also feel like she’s trying on a costume (she toyed with the idea of going trick-or-treating as a punk last Halloween but went as a goth vampire instead), which, like all costumes, can be discarded. The battle against cynicism will be a lifelong one, I think, and is not limited to those who dress only in black.
While committing some then-punk sins in my youth (I still had a job, I still smoked pot, I still washed my hair), I managed to avoid the poser tag by getting most of my gear — Army jackets, bowling shirts, spaz sunglasses — from the Salvation Army. The punk stores that existed were mostly cheap and located on off streets in the Mission District. Only a poser would buy a motorcycle jacket from a boutique.
The little punks and goths of today don’t have to go skulking around back alleys to get their garb. Now, kids can get their goth on at any of Hot Topic’s over 500 stores, conveniently located in local shopping malls. Goth has gone mainstream or mainstream enough to be considered just another fashion choice for the young miss or mister. The equally ubiquitous Claire’s Accessories, where good girls once went to get just their ears pierced, now sells silver cross leatherette cuffs right beside the butterfly glitter charms. Even Disneyland features fashions inspired by Tim Burton’s “Nightmare Before Christmas.”
While Emily the Strange — a dark-banged night crawler with four cats for friends — can be found in America’s better shopping malls, she was born in West Oakland’s Dogtown, a neighborhood with real street cred. Emily creators Matt Reed and Rob Reger (whose company, Cosmic Debris, also brought us such Hello-Kitty-in-hell characters as Oopsy Daisy — she of the “Oops!” shirts — and Yum Pop) had the brilliant idea of making street wear for girls and adding the goth touch. “When we first started we didn’t really have an age in mind,” says Cosmic Debris’ Brian Brooks of Emily’s early days. “It was just whoever would buy it.” Brooks worked on Emily for years before coming up with Oopsy Daisy (whose audience he defines as “anybody who likes things a little bit messed up”). Though Emily now has her imitators, he thinks her appeal is her singularity.
“Emily is the original one who forged into this darker land,” says Brooks. “Everything geared toward kids is sickly sweet and colorful.”
If Cosmic Debris gave the little goth girls something to wear, the makers of Living Dead Dolls gave them something to play with. Living Dead Dolls are just that; each comes in its own coffin, with its own death certificate. Some are missing eyeballs, in a look that owes nothing to Little Orphan Annie. In fact, the general expression is one of menace, closer to “The Twilight Zone’s” Talking Tina than to Chatty Cathy. Like Emily, the dolls went from cult status (co-creators Ed Long and Damien Glonek originally made them by hand and sold them at horror conventions like Chiller Theatre) to the mainstream. (The dolls are now made in China and sold in Tower Records and Hot Topic.) And there’s ancillary merchandise as well: T-shirts (“We’ve Passed Away, Now It’s Time to Play”), stationery and a dead-doll’s-head pencil sharpener (stick a pencil in its eye and the shavings come out its mouth).
“There’s really not one set or group that is buying our dolls,” says Glonek. “We do a lot of conventions and signings and we see a certain core of our audience. They range from little kids to older women and men in their 50s and 60s. And they’re from all walks of life, from goths to punks to normal housewives.” The creators of both Emily and the Living Dead Dolls seem somewhat clueless when it comes to their merchandise’s appeal to the younger set, or maybe they’re just too busy to consider the implications of marketing morbidity to little girls.
Older fans may appreciate the echoes of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey found here (“Shy little Hush and her pet rat Shriek/ Dwelling in the sewer, these two are bound to reek”) while kids hear something else. (The packages are labeled: “For Spooky Kids Age 15 and Up.”) “I think some of the darker humor aspect goes over their heads,” Glonek says of the preteen girls clutching tiny coffins in their hands. “They just see the cute little creepy dolls, which is the essence of the product to begin with. They’re too young for the humor. They grasp onto the innocence of it.”
And grasping at innocence is what we’re talking about here. Not the girls: Some are too innocent to know what the loss of innocence means, while others are itching for the chance to throw theirs away, as soon as they can figure out how. No, the people grasping at innocence here are fools like me: the parents.
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When Franny’s friend Catherine came to visit, my wife took the girls ice skating. While Catherine hugged the rails, knock-kneed in her safety-pinned skirt, a grown man circled about and stopped to compliment her on her look. “Do you know that goth shop over on 10th Avenue?” he asked her before my wife shooed him away. He was, in the local argot, a creep.
In the aftermath of this encounter, both Franny and Catherine had a chance to consider the downside of the goth look. “She and her girlfriends think sex stuff is gross,” Catherine’s mother tells me, and the very mention of sex is enough to give Franny the giggles. But the creep at the ice rink is not alone in his fixation. Just Googling “goth girls,” I got a couple of provocative hits: popular indie porn site Suicide Girls, with plenty of soft-porn pictures, and Barely Evil, “Gothic erotica, punk porn and bad girl models.” It seems sex and death preoccupy some others as well, and some of them do more than simply surf the Web.
But at this age, girls just want to have fun. It’s the parents who bring their anxieties to the table, sometimes accompanied by misgivings about their own adolescent behavior. “Parents experience an enormous sense of loss when their girls enter this new land,” Mary Pipher wrote in her seminal work “Reviving Ophelia,” a book that posited the idea that the best aspects of pre-adolescent girls — their independence, their confidence, their courage — were lost in the “Bermuda Triangle” of teendom. Pressured to become “feminine” and define themselves in relation to men, girls lost their identities and punished themselves through conformity, anorexia and self-destructive behavior.
But as a parent who stands on the other side of that gulf, I feel like I’m peering into the murk. I don’t want to make too much of my daughter’s fashion choices; she is in the midst of defining her own style, she tells me, and is quick to take offense. Franny is also of the age where she trusts the adult world to look after her. When Janet Jackson exposed her breast at the Super Bowl halftime show, Franny refused to believe that “they” would allow such a thing to happen. “Can they show that on TV?” she asked, stung more by Justin Timberlake’s staged humiliation of the singer than the sight of Jackson’s bejeweled nipple.
Right now her interest in the macabre is as childish as our love of “Casper the Friendly Ghost” was when we were kids. Last night she put her Living Dead Dolls to bed side by side, their little coffins touching, as if to protect them. She has a host of pets — a dog, a cat, a turtle and a fish — that she blesses each night, too, in a sort of rude 10-year-old way. Pipher believes that preadolescent girls identify with animals so strongly because they empathize with their lack of speech, their powerlessness. Could they empathize with ghosts for the same reason? Or is it a sign that they’re too big to be scared? Living Dead Dolls, for instance, offer both a through-line to childhood (remember when we played with dolls?) and a send-up of that innocence (remember when we chopped their heads off?).
Pulling her dark hair over her eyes, Franny can do a spot-on impression of the little dead girl in “The Ring.” “Everyone will suffer!” she hisses. The Buddhist in me figures she’s right about that. But I would like to delay some of her suffering just a little while longer. There will be time enough for death wishes and revenge fantasies, not to mention the real heartache and horrors of adolescence. Maybe adopting the goth look, however timorously, will be Franny’s way of outfoxing the femininity trap. (Black lipstick certainly says, “I’m nobody’s damn doll!”) How can I tell? The codes have changed since I was young. Watching her from the shore as she sets off on her journey I can only hope I’ll be able to tell if she is drowning or just waving. Providing she looks back at all.
It’s Friday night in San Francisco and a crowd has gathered at the Justice League, a cavern on a dirty stretch of Divisadero Street, for an evening of punk rock, old (Slaughter and the Dogs) and new (the Belltones). The local scene, always less violent than L.A.’s and less arty than New York’s, wins points for endurance. Looking out over the river of mohawks, porkpies and D.A.s, you could swear it was 1977.
Among the faithful tonight are the Dharma Punx, a loose affiliation of friends who share a love of punk rock and a penchant for spiritual practice. In S.F., home to gay conservatives and pacifist policemen, spiritual punks hardly raise a pierced eyebrow. The Justice League doorman waves them in like the regulars they are. There’s Mike Haber, who was the leader of a rockabilly motorcycle gang in Santa Cruz, Calif., before sobering up and discovering meditation; and Lars Frederiksen, the clean-and-sober member of the stalwart S.F. punk band Rancid, as well as a new group called the Bastards; and Lars’ roommate, Noah Levine, a former drunk, drug addict and jailbird who now brings Buddhist teaching into jails and juvenile halls, when he’s not out seeing shows.
Levine is the glue that holds the crew together. With his shaved head, gold teeth and neck-to-navel tattoos he could be standard issue street punk — until you notice that among the images adorning his arms are those of Buddha and Krishna, and instead of “hate” and “love” tattooed across the knuckles of his hands, he’s got “wisdom” and “compassion.” (“Same thing,” he shrugs when I ask him about it later.) And despite his gentle manner, his drug-and-alcohol-free status, the locals don’t treat him like a wimp.
“Some of the people in the Dharma Punx are some of the oldest punks in the scene,” he tells me outside the club. “At 31, I’ve been coming to punk shows for 18 years. It’s not like some Buddhist guy coming in and trying to infiltrate a scene. This has been my scene my whole life.”
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Levine’s “whole life” did not promise to be a long-running show at first. Despite a privileged middle-class upbringing and a famous spiritual teacher (Stephen Levine) for a father, he seemed ready for an early grave in his teen years, or at best a life behind bars. “I had friends who had done time there,” he says of San Quentin, “so the first time I walked out in the yard there were all these kinds of images: This is what my brothers, my friends had to deal with.
“But I also felt like, this is my population, these are my peers. But for this interesting turn of fate — but for the grace of the universe, for lack of a better word — I ended up getting out of this. But I was headed on a nonstop train to prison for several years.”
Levine doesn’t spend all his time at punk clubs and prisons. Sometimes he can be found at spiritual retreats such as Marin County’s center for Buddhist study, Spirit Rock (where he has led teen and family meditation groups) or New York’s Omega Institute. These are familiar scenes for Levine, despite his brush with prison. His father is a star in these circles. His books on death and grieving (“Who Dies?” and “A Gradual Awakening”), often written in collaboration with his wife (and Noah’s stepmother), Ondrea, have sold over a million copies.
But like any good adolescent, Noah did not have time for his father or his “practice” when he was growing up. “As our youngest child, Noah, dutifully rebelled, he rejected ‘meditation and the lot,’” Stephen Levine wrote in a personal memoir, “Embracing the Beloved.” “Having mutinied with considerable energy and originality in our youth, we could not imagine how he might ‘get to us’ as we had ‘gotten’ our parents … Until the afternoon he came home from school with a tattoo and nailed me.”
Says Noah, “As soon as I heard punk rock, when I was 11 years old, I knew that I had found my tribe.” Bouncing around between his father’s home in a remote part of New Mexico and his mother’s place in Santa Cruz, Noah began to alienate himself to the tune of the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. With his parents’ blessing, he declared himself “emancipated” at age 16, “with the intention to be on my own,” he recalls. “But I couldn’t get my shit together so I was still on my mom’s couch.”
He dropped out of high school and hit the streets of Santa Cruz to live the life of a full-time skate punk. He was arrested for numerous infractions — drugs, alcohol, hitting someone over the head with his skateboard — until the local authorities locked him up for serious time when he was 17. His folks had tried to warn him about the choices he was making, “But when I try to remember what they were saying, I have this impression of the adults in ‘Peanuts’: ‘Wah, wah, wah.’ Even though I probably knew they were telling the truth, I didn’t believe ‘em.”
Noah spent his last year as a teenager locked down. “They said, ‘You get arrested too much, we’re taking you off the streets.’” And while any parent would freak to see their kid behind bars, the experience had a particular resonance for Stephen Levine. “It must have been very difficult for him but interesting,” says Noah, “because he had also been in prison. He did time for pot in the ’60s on Rikers Island.” As Noah began a three-month stretch at Santa Cruz County Juvenile Hall (he served another three months in a halfway house), his father began to call him with personalized instructions.
“My father said, ‘Meditation is the only thing that ever worked for me.’ And that’s when I started practicing. The relationship was such that when I was vulnerable and in enough pain and ready to change and take responsibility, I was able to hear it from him.” Noah also was ready to deal with the addictions he had picked up over the years.
“Pretty much everything” is how Levine defines his drug consumption then. “My drug of choice, what really brought me to the bottom, was my addiction to crack cocaine. But I was using heroin and PCP and any kind of pills and booze I could get my hands on.” He began a 12-step recovery program, brought to him and the other juvies by young punks who worked with teen addicts. “They weren’t just adult wino recovering folks,” he says. In fact there was the whole clean-and-sober punk movement called Straight Edge brewing at the time, and Levine took to it like a convert, drawing X’s (the sign of Straight Edge) on his hands. “That was my real refuge,” he says. “Once I got sober, that was all I had — the punk scene.”
It was not enough. Though he attended college (studying psychology and, later, emergency medical technician training) and had a few jobs, he found new ways of misbehaving. At age 19 he was arrested in Santa Cruz for vandalizing property with graffiti. Mike Haber, leader of the United Rockers, a biker gang that favored British Triumphs and Nortons, recalls seeing graffiti all over Santa Cruz that Levine had left: “Noah Core,” “Just Say Noah.”
“A lot of his friends, the punks and the skins, just wanted to kick his butt about that,” says Haber. “They just wanted to give him the beat down.”
The “Noah Core” tags led to his arrest, not surprisingly. Though he avoided jail time, Levine could not avoid a spiritual lesson: “What I was looking for was not really going to be found in anything outside of myself; it was an inside job, or at least a spiritual job.
“I had been using meditation in those first couple of years the way people often use prayer,” he says: “‘Oh God, get me out of this one and I’ll never do it again!’” Combining more extended periods of reflection with a greater dedication to 12-step principles he found himself face to face with one of those ugly facts familiar to recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.
“I began to see that all of my actions are very selfish, very self-centered,” he recalls. “I was still causing a lot of pain to myself and other people. As I began to see that in my meditation practice and my recovery practice, I began to start changing.” He was working then, making fairly good money at a hospital in Santa Cruz, and he put his salary to a new use.
“I started taking responsibility for all of my past actions and making amends, repaying tens of thousands of dollars, not only for the graffiti stuff but all the people I had stolen from, and really actively started seeking forgiveness.”
Levine was still a biker wannabe then and though Haber and the United Rockers tolerated him, they wouldn’t give him a patch because he wouldn’t drink with them. He talked to them about meditation then, but “everyone thought he was crazy,” says Haber.
Ten years later, when Levine “had traded in my motorcycle for a meditation cushion,” he ran into Haber in San Francisco. The ex-United Rockers leader had just quit drinking and was experiencing the roller-coaster effects of new sobriety. “He helped me with my 12-step work,” says Haber, “and I asked him, ‘What’s this other stuff you’re doing?’”
“He was a natural Dharma Punk,” says Levine, using the handle he coined — with a nod to Kerouac’s book “Dharma Bums” — to describe his fellow “spiritual revolutionaries.” “And for me it was such a wonderful full circle: to be able to offer something back to someone who I had looked up to in the past.”
The two remain close today and Haber’s spiritual practice is stronger than ever. He volunteers at San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project, providing care and comfort to AIDS patients, many of whom are indigent. Like Levine, he was given the fisheye by some of the project’s other volunteers when he arrived — a reaction he could understand. “I used to hate hippies,” he says, “and I thought meditation was just for hippies. It’s all part of breaking down the walls.” Are there others following the Dharma Punx example? “More than I ever dreamed of,” says Haber. “The kids now are more interested in learning about spiritual practice than we ever were.”
In the 10 years since his second arrest, hundreds of young people have been turning out to hear Noah Levine’s story. After studying with renowned Buddhist teachers Jack Kornfield and Mary Orr, Noah began conducting classes himself, starting at Spirit Rock. He’s aware that his family connection has a lot to do with the attention he’s received. “I think if some other fully tattooed hooligan showed up and said, ‘I’m teaching meditation,’ he might not be as well received,” he says with a laugh. “But also my father has reminded me, ‘Your name, your lineage will open doors for you, it will get you invited in for tea. But if you don’t have anything interesting to say, if you’re not a good teacher, you won’t be invited back.’”
Though the young people at Spirit Rock and Omega are less desperate than the captive crowds he addresses in jail, Levine still feels a connection to them. He has billed his classes as “Buddhism for the Next Generation,” noting that for the most part Buddhist practice has been embraced in this country by boomers — ex-beats and hippies. He’s trying to connect with people in their 20s and 30s, even teenagers, though the song remains the same.
“I don’t think the dharma is any different,” he says. “The dharma — the teaching of the Buddha, the spiritual truths — is ageless. It’s survived now for 2,500 years and each generation maybe teaches it in a different way, but it’s a pretty set, simple tradition.” And Buddhism and its core concepts — that attachment causes suffering, and an end to attachment will end suffering — is something he’s happy to promote however he can.
What is the meaning of “Dharma Punx,” the slogan he has tattooed on his hands and the title of his forthcoming autobiography? “It’s taking that rebellion off the streets, and turning it into our own hearts and minds.”
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A fight breaks out in the Justice League after the Belltones’ set. Noah and I are in a doorway outside by then, catching up as kids come by to pay their respects and ask him what’s happening. “I hear you’ve taken up smoking,” a punkette says to him accusingly. “Yeah,” he admits. “I started smoking when I started writing. The whole Jack Kerouac thing.”
Right now, getting schmoozed by kids on the street, Noah Levine seems like some S.F. update of the teen preacher in the 1970 Christian flick “The Cross and the Switchblade.” Call it “The Mandala and the Skateboard.” With the trappings of materialism (he drives a ’64 Impala Super Sport, maroon with tan interior these days — “my dream car”) and adoration, does he worry about his ego getting in the way of his message? “The trick is not taking it personally. It’s not Noah inspiring people; it’s the dharma inspiring people,” he says.
Besides, adds Levine, “Whether I was doing Buddhist meditation teaching or I was doing nothing, I would still be saying hello to all those people.”
The first time it happened I didn’t pay it any mind. I was having lunch with a couple of young women in Manhattan about a year and a half ago; one was an editor at a magazine I was doing some work for, the other was a writer who had just done a nice story for us. The writer had already made some waves with a novel of the I-was-a-teenage-nymphomaniac sort so popular a few years back. For a middle-aged man such as myself, lunches don’t get much more promising.
We were just past the introductions, opening the menus and ordering drinks, when the young nympho fixed me with a frank gaze.
“Did anyone ever tell you,” she said, smiling coquettishly, “that you look just like George Bush?” I must have shot water out of my nose because she hastened to add, “I find him very attractive!”
“You know, you do kind of,” the editor said. The rest of the lunch passed in a blur as I tried to study my reflection in the silverware. At least she didn’t mean George Sr.
The next time it happened I was at another lunch. The editor of a men’s magazine was interested in hiring me to write for them on a regular basis. We were in one of these clubby old steak houses where you can imagine them killing the steers in the back room, but I was not wearing a suit, nor was my jacket adorned with an American flag stick pin. I was in the middle of making some droll observation when he leaned forward and squinted a bit.
“It’s weird,” he said, “but you look just like the president. Has anyone ever told you that?”
Once, I admitted, but the woman who said it was so crazy that she thought the president was hot. Maybe, I suggested, people just have Bush on the brain.
“No,” he said with determination. “There’s definitely a resemblance.” Reminding myself how much I wanted the job I grimaced and agreed. For all I knew this guy was part of W’s inner circle. For all I knew he thought George was hot.
It would be facetious of me to say that I have nothing against our president. Like half the country, I was appalled when he was elected and prayed for an uneventful four years. And like 95 percent of the country, I prayed even harder when things got eventful last year that he had the character to get us through this crisis. My feelings about his intelligence or qualifications are balanced by a sense of hopeful fear, or fearful hope. As LBJ told the American people, “I’m the only president you’ve got.”
But as my feelings about George W. Bush vacillated I never once thought: Damn! I wish I looked like that. Too beady-eyed, I thought. Too jug-eared. Too weak-chinned. Too … rich.
I decided that in my media engorged city I was just hanging out with too many people who watched too much TV. Out in the heartland no one would mistake me for the president, or his doppelgänger. I happened to be on assignment in the heartland last October, doing a story in Hibbing, Minn., when I heard those fateful words. I was sitting in a restaurant called Zimmy’s — a sort of shrine to Bob Dylan, Hibbing’s most famous son — interviewing a couple of locals. We’d had a nice talk and I was paying the bill when one of them said to me, sotto voce, “You probably hear this all the time.”
Uh-oh. “What?” I said, smiling hopefully.
“You and W?” He made a sort of ambiguous gesture with his hand — more than amigos? Less than hermanos? I grimaced in reply.
“I’ve heard it,” I said through gritted teeth and resolved to do something about it. Studying my reflection in the bathroom mirror that night I recalled the other people I had been compared to during my life. Kris Kristofferson, when we were both young and before he had the beard. Jim Morrison, when we were both alive and before he had the belly. Patrick Swayze, when we were both single and before he mistook the freeway for a runway.
What did these men have in common with the president and me, aside from a pronounced history of substance abuse? Small eyes (though I wouldn’t call them beady), a high forehead, a certain fullness of face. I considered growing a beard but my daughter said I would look like an old man while my wife said people would think I was having a midlife crisis. Right. Her hair color changes more than Tom Ridge’s daily danger index but it’s the price of being a magazine pro. I stop shaving for two days and I’m having a midlife crisis …
It was the hair, I decided. Like W, I still have most of mine. And again, como mi hermano, I’ve been wearing it pretty short now for a while. I had long hair in the late ’60s and duck tails and who knows what else in the ’70s and ’80s, but for the last six years I’ve been getting the same cut every six weeks. Call it The Clooney: the short Caesar cut, inspired by the former “ER” actor, so popular with graying gents a few years ago. Clooney has moved on, sartorially speaking, but for a number of men of a certain age, his old cut remains a no-brainer. You don’t have to think about it, let alone do anything to it, yet style-wise you are still several rungs above the full Cromwell.
The problem with my Clooney is that when it grew a little, at about Week 4, it revealed a hairline uncannily like our president’s. Change the hair and change the man, I figured, and I returned to New York filled with determination. I let my hair grow longer than it had been in years and started to slick it back; the effect generally owed more to Joe Strummer than Pat Riley but no one was playing “Hail to the Chief” when I entered the room.
I told Alberto, the barber who has been giving me The Clooney for the last six years, that I wanted to go longer. People had been telling me I looked like the president, I explained. He frowned and in his Chico Marx accent said, “That’s-a no good.” He worked with me, trimming the sides, evening out the top, while I began to fuss with my hair à la John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” In a quest to avoid looking like our leader I was becoming high-maintenance.
Things fell apart during the World Cup. When I went to see Alberto, Italy had yet to be eliminated. He was wearing his Del Piero jersey and pacing around his barber chair like a cheetah. He swore he’d been sleeping but he didn’t seem to be paying attention as he cut my hair. After he applied some gel I looked like Gumby. I was in danger of morphing from George W. into Ronald Reagan.
The kicker came at a Barnes & Noble store in Brooklyn. I was checking out when the clerk behind the counter did an exaggerated double take. “Damn!” he said, shaking his head and blinking his eyes like Chris Rock. “Mr. President! I was looking for the Secret Service!”
I wanted to point out that my hair was nothing at all like the president’s but decided to give it up. For an instant I thought maybe I could do something with this perceived similarity. In the movie “Dave,” Kevin Kline looks so much like the POTUS that he runs the country for a few days, à la “The Prince and the Pauper.” He even balances the budget in the bargain.
But the chances of me being invited to the White House are about those of seeing George W. on the Brooklyn Bridge. If nothing else, I decided I would take back my hair. I returned to Alberto (long after they’d stopped partying in Brazil) and demanded The Clooney. He seemed pleased with my return to form. The Romans, after all, invented the Caesar cut.
It’s been almost a week since then and no one has yet asked me about that Harken stock or mentioned the name Osama. I figure it’s all projection anyway. When Clinton was first elected, a homeless man on the subway told me I was a dead ringer for Bill.
Maybe people just recognize presidential material when they see it.
When Jann Wenner finally announced a few weeks ago that he had hired the British editor of a laddie mag to be the new managing editor of Rolling Stone, media critics heralded it as a sea change in American publishing. “The U.S. music industry bible is about to be re-written,” brayed the Guardian, a left-leaning British daily, “and its purist followers already sense the whiff of betrayal.”
The Moonie-owned Washington Times, ever ready to re-fight the culture wars of the ’60s, painted the hiring of FHM editor Ed Needham as a potentially good thing, one that might sound a death knell to the writings of Hunter S. Thompson and his imitators: “It’s probably too much to expect a change in the sort of drug-boosterism that inspires pot-friendly travel tips, non-judgmental post-mortems on overdosed rockers, and hysterical posturings against the drug wars.” The Los Angeles Times was downright nasty. “Shove over, you middle-aged boys, with your Bics burning at Bruce Springsteen concerts, your thinning hair, your love of 6,000-word dispatches from Tom Wolfe and other gonzo authors,” read the lead. “It’s not about you anymore.”
But for all the Chicken Little clucking (caused in part by Needham’s own remarks of the who-has-time-to-read variety), there is no immediate evidence that the old guard is up in arms. As with the tennis-playing mimes at the end of Antonioni’s “Blow Up” — to really date myself — there is no ball in the air. That movie is best remembered by rock cognoscenti for the nightclub scene: The Yardbirds are on stage performing “Train Kept A-Rolling” when Jeff Beck’s guitar starts to distort. He smashes the neck into an amplifier, breaks it off and tosses it into the crowd, at which point a scrum breaks out. The hero (played by David Hemmings) fights for the guitar neck and, having secured the prize, walks outside and tosses it in the trash.
Which may be how those boomers mocked by media mavens feel about the magazine. It has been a shadow of its former self for so long that most of us have forgotten what its former self looked like. While most of the press reaction to Wenner’s choice of editor — which came after months of speculation and supposed soul-searching on his part — referred to “long investigative” pieces, not many were mentioned by name. (T.D. Allman’s long dispatch from Colombia, the second half of which appears in the July 4 issue, represents the last vestiges of that tradition.)
The sui generis writings of Thompson and P.J. O’Rourke are seldom seen in the magazine’s pages now, and even those seem like pale imitations of the original. The truth is that Rolling Stone has been such an undistinguished hybrid — part ’70s-style journalism (investigative reporting, distinct voices and rambling interviews), and part any other entertainment magazine you can name — for so long that most of its subscribers are probably unaware that they still get it. Why upset them by sending some tricked-up men’s mag with the classic Rolling Stone logo emblazoned on the top?
It’s demographically impossible to please both 49-year-old rock fans and the walking boners who buy FHM (or more to the point, Blender, the Maxim-derived music mag that got Wenner trembling in the first place), so why try? Rather than reintroduce the magazine with a new facelift, guaranteed to be as warmly received as Greta Van Susteren’s, why not do something altogether more radical? Why not shut the mother down?
It may seem like an insane idea on the face of it. Any magazine with a million-plus circulation (compared to Spin’s 525,000 and Blender’s 350,000-and-growing) is sitting pretty in today’s down market. It was Rolling Stone’s declining newsstand sales that moved Wenner to fire managing editor Robert Love, a 20-year veteran of the magazine (Wenner lists himself as publisher and editor, while the managing editor actually puts out the magazine), and it is newsstand savvy that British editors are believed to possess. (New M.E. Needham has actually been in the U.S. three years now, and his FHM is as Americanized as an afternoon of MTV and about as thought-provoking.)
Indeed, it was the whirring caused by Blender’s newsstand sales that put Wenner in motion in the first place. With only seven issues under its belt, Dennis Publications’ foray into the rock biz — which bills itself “The Ultimate Music Magazine” — is leaping off the shelves. Its magic-bean numbers are reminiscent of the advent of its cousin Maxim (whose seeming overnight success turned nearly every men’s magazine in the country into a frat party a few years ago) and the effect on the competition has been just as pronounced.
Even before Wenner made his move, Spin editor Alan Light took a stroll, ostensibly to start his own magazine, though his replacement, Sia Michel, has said she will make some changes that could make the magazine more Blender-like. And in announcing Love’s imminent departure, Wenner also pledged to put his journal on a shorter lead time while speeding up the production cycle in the interest of breaking news sooner.
But in his publicized search for an M.E. — all the more notable given the number of editors out of work in New York — Wenner seemed to indicate that he was not willing to sell out completely. After a meeting with former Maxim editor Mark Golin (now an AOL vice president and creative director) the two deemed the union a nonstarter. Golin, who briefly brought his short-and-snappy style to Condé Nast’s Details in 1999 before getting the heave, was more interested in rebuilding Rolling Stone from the ground up than Wenner was. For all his tough talk, it seemed Wenner was unwilling to throw the baby out with the bong water.
In the 37-year-old Needham (who some have suggested was his first choice all along), Wenner seems to have found an editor willing to try it both ways. After some early remarks disparaging Rolling Stone’s perpetual “wall of copy,” Needham went on the offensive, qualifying his remarks to anyone who called. “One of the things that has made Rolling Stone the magazine that it is, is its great journalistic pedigree,” he told the Guardian, “and I certainly intend to preserve and maintain that.” To the San Francisco Chronicle’s Dan Fost he was even more blunt: “It’s certainly not the end of Rolling Stone as you know it,” he insisted.
Right. That happened some time ago. Since the first issues of Rolling Stone rolled off the printers at San Francisco’s Garrett Press (publishers of the Hillsdale Merchandiser and the Irish Herald) in 1967, Wenner has tweaked the magazine several times. In the late ’70s he dragged the publication from the West Coast to New York, launching a few new titles (Us, Men’s Journal) along the way. As music mutated (disco, punk, rap, grunge) Rolling Stone struggled to keep up while covering politics, movies, even the odd crime story. But by trying to reach a younger audience even as it holds onto the old with the other hand, Rolling Stone is starting to look contorted, like some aging hipster playing Twister until his back gives out.
It’s a scary time in the magazine business. The ad market is flat (though some publications saw a bump in May), tobacco companies are pulling out of publications aimed at minors and many ad buyers perceive Rolling Stone in particular as catering to an aging demographic. While Wenner likes to point out that the average age of its readers is 27, the twin blades of Perception and Reality — the key words behind a famous Rolling Stone 1985 ad campaign — cut both ways.
So why not start over? Go after the kids you crave with whatever it is you think kids want while letting the august title of Rolling Stone go out with some dignity. Old wheezers like me (who saw the Faces when they were still Small) can comfort themselves with what they remember of the magazine in its glory days while the belly-button set can enjoy yet another outlet for nearly-naked Natalie Portman pictures. The fix that Needham promises — “busier design, a lot of entry points on every page” — will certainly remind us of Blender, but the mix will no doubt be familiar to any reader of general-interest magazines. Wherein lies the problem.
As Wenner himself has noted, a lot of titles are feeding off the menu he helped invent. Entertainment Weekly has launched a regular music supplement; Vanity Fair socks its readers with a fall music issue the size of the Manhattan phone book; magazines and newspapers alike pursue celebrities with the same slavish devotion. But none of them pretends to be the country’s preeminent rock publication. Though putting Portman on the cover certainly appeals to some younger readers, it’s got nothing to do with music. The same issue (June 28) featured a paltry 16 CD reviews (as opposed to the 195 in the June/July Blender, a number touted on its cover) and, aside from a short profile of Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, no real rock ‘n’ roll features.
As Rolling Stone has slowly morphed into a magazine just like dozens of others, it has lost its reason for being. It was never meant to be the ultimate magazine of the music business (Billboard still does that just fine, thanks); if anything it was meant to give the finger to that business, as well as magazine publishing in general, television, Madison Avenue, the Pentagon, etc. Without that contrary attitude — or any attitude at all, for the most part — Rolling Stone seems like an anachronism, the Ladies’ Home Journal of rock journalism.
Is it possible for a rock magazine to age with dignity? Overlooked in all the talk about newsstand sales is the growing popularity of some other British imports, Mojo and Uncut. While Mojo in particular is maligned as a retread publication for those who never tire of reading one more explication of Elvis Presley’s truck-driving days or the origins of the Buzzcocks, it is not nearly as time-warped as that. By establishing their credentials as lovers of rock in all its forms, the editors of Mojo can back up their current recommendations. When they told me to drop everything and go hear the White Stripes, I did.
Uncut takes the formula a step further, including free CDs with each issue that feature a sampler of bands reviewed in its pages, old and new. The current issue, featuring a CD of various artists covering Bob Dylan songs, is sold out at the newsstands in New York — at $9 a pop. My point being: I’m willing to spend money on the newsstand, but not on a magazine that puts Natalie Portman (or Kirsten Dunst or any other beautiful young actress) on the cover.
Celebrity covers, and celebrity coverage in general, is considered a necessary evil by magazine editors everywhere (and anyone who has dealt with these celebrities’ publicists knows that “evil” is used here in a strictly descriptive sense). The guiding philosophy is to get the suckers in the tent, which is fine if you then give them some bread along with the circus. Any magazine with a starlet on the cover has to then pass the airplane test: It must give me enough to read to get me through the average unpleasant airplane flight. Rolling Stone doesn’t even get me through the gate and onto the jetway. And that’s in its current incarnation, buttressed by what Needham calls “the wall of copy.” At a time when it’s not insulting to call a magazine a “flip book” or a “must-skim,” don’t expect more of the new Rolling Stone.
Not that Needham will find himself unfettered. Rolling Stone has always been Wenner’s magazine and he has done a great job over the years, giving free voice to writers as diverse as Lester Bangs and Tom Wolfe. He made stars of Hunter Thompson and Annie Leibovitz and his fingerprints can be found all over journalism. Though his attempts to turn Wenner Media into an empire have certainly distracted him, he has an undisputed eye for talent and a seeming appetite for adventure. And while famously thin-skinned and imperious — he hates to be addressed by the help but is reportedly stung when he goes unrecognized by the press — there is no law that says publishing geniuses need to be likable. Which might explain why none of them are.
No, “[His] sin is [his] lifelessness,” as Bob Dylan sang in “Desolation Row” and Greil Marcus later wrote (in the pages of Rolling Stone) of Elvis in Vegas. No one who was witness to the creation of the magazine mistook Wenner for a hippie; he always wanted success and, like rock promoter Bill Graham, was often condemned for just that. But with that drive he combined principles. His inaugural editor’s note makes Charles Foster Kane’s manifesto sound practically jaded.
“We have begun a new publication reflecting what we see are the changes in rock and roll and the changes related to rock and roll,” Wenner wrote in the fall of 1967. “Because the trade papers have become so inaccurate and irrelevant, and because the fan magazines are an anachronism, fashioned in the mold of myth and nonsense, we hope we have something here for the artists and the industry, and every person who ‘believes in the magic that can set you free.’”
That last line is from the Lovin’ Spoonful song that John Sebastian long ago licensed to McDonald’s. The world has changed immeasurably since Wenner wrote that note and he would doubtless blush to read those words today. He never wanted to be portrayed as some progenitor of ’60s counterculture, even as he dreamt up the promotional idea of sending out roach clips with each subscription. He just knew which way the smoke was blowing — even when he pointed out (as in the Perception/Reality ad campaign) that his readers drove BMWs instead of Volkswagen vans and drank vintage California wine instead of Ripple. But the magazine’s name (and its very typeface) still has a resonance with readers like me, while I’m sure the young readers Wenner wants would draw a complete blank if pressed on its etymology.
The community that once existed for Rolling Stone has splintered, like pop music itself, into a thousand shards, and there are plenty of publications covering those fractions (not forgetting Vibe — which actually sells far more copies than Spin or Blender — along with the Source, Fader, Q and so on). A magazine built on the notion of Us vs. Them is no longer relevant; there is no Us.
Unless you mean the magazine. That publication was launched with no principles whatsoever and no mission beyond competing with People. Having found, in Bonnie Fuller, an editor willing to suck what little brains there ever were out of Us Weekly, Wenner finally has the editors at People alarmed as newsstand sales of Us are climbing. All he had to do was tout some celebrity diet secrets and rip the façade off Jennifer Lopez’s marriage to get there. Yes, Us is doing fine without a thought in its head. Let’s hope that if Rolling Stone gets the same lobotomy, Wenner will have the decency to smother it with a pillow.
