American Rhapsody Read Free Page A

she said.
    He said nothing until they got to his office.
    â€œGood-bye, pretty girl,” he said, and walked away. She got behind the wheel and popped the tape out to put in another one and she heard the disc jockey on the radio say that Elvis Presley was dead in Memphis. She started to cry and drove away, the tears streaming down her face.
    The transcendent rock and roll moment . . . and it ended with a crash and a burn. Roaring down the highway in a brand-new Cadillac, rock and roll blasting, the sun shining, a beautiful girl with her legs up on the dash, a little water to slake your thirst, getting it on again, and then . . .
death
.
    A slice of life at Altamont, only four months after Woodstock, love and peace and beads splattered by blood, the beauty of naked bodies at Woodstock obliterated forever by an obscenely naked fat man with a knife plunged into his mottled, greasy flesh. Oyez, oyez, darkness once again at the heart of rock and roll. Darkness and danger and sex. Knives and guns and Cadillacs careening into the pitch-black night. Forget the Beatles and their “good day sunshine.” Rock and roll was about sex, not about love. It was about excess, not about romance. Bill Clinton understood that. It was exactly why he loved it. Bill Clinton was a rock and roll hog.
    So was I. I knew it, too, having seen it, even tasted it, firsthand. As a writer for
Rolling Stone
, I had helicoptered into a crowd of 100,000 drunken, naked kids in Darlington, North Carolina, with Alice Cooper and Three Dog Night and watched as Alice guillotined chickens onstage, spraying blood over these sunburned and sweaty, naked kids, who’d rub the blood into one another’s privates. I’d sat, afterward, around the pool of a Holiday Inn with the bands and a hundred local groupies as everyone got naked and the night blazed into a chlorine-smelling human blur of contorted wet bodies.
    As a screenwriter, I’d waited in the living room of a Denver hotel suite at eight one morning for Bob Dylan to emerge from his bedroom. A half-full quart of Jim Beam stood on the living room cocktail table, along with three or four broken lines of coke. A pair of black silver-toed cowboy boots was under the table. One girl came out of Bob’s bedroom, then another, then another. They looked tired and sleepy and were scantily and hastily dressed. They said hi in a shy and embarrassed way and then they left. Five minutes later, Bob came out, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing jeans, his hair an airborne jungle, his complexion graveyard gray. He sat down at the cocktail table, took a long slug of the Jim Beam, did a line of coke, smiled, and said, “Howya doin?”
    That’s what rock and roll was about! Brakes screeching, knives flashing in the moonlight, bodies aswirl in a lighted pool, blood spraying naked flesh, Mick with a whip in his hand, Keith’s skull ring gleaming, a bottle of Jim Beam, silver-toed cowboy boots, a girl in a Cadillac with her legs up, a finger being sucked clean of the juice in her navel.
    Rock and roll was Elvis doing “One Night” and “Mystery Train” before Colonel Parker and Hollywood tried to turn him into the Singing Eunuch . . . Jerry Lee Lewis spraying more lighter fluid on his already-burning piano . . . Otis Redding running down a fire escape as an irate husband shot at him from a window above . . . Chuck Berry videotaping himself as he urinated on a hooker . . . Little Richard getting a backstage blow job as the curtain went up from the groupie whom Buddy Holly was doing doggy-style at the same time . . . the Stones passing that catatonic naked blonde over their heads in
Cocksucker Blues
.
    Rock and roll was a young Jerry Lee sneaking over to Haney’s in Natchez and watching an old black man play boogie-woogie piano. It was a young mascaraed Elvis sneaking down to Beale Street in Memphis, watching an old black