Night Beat Read Free Page B

still mattered to
me—
that is, it still helped me. Popular music, all said and done, was among the best friends—and one of the few real confidants—I’d ever known in my life. Whereas you could talk to and confide and hope and trust in a lover, that lover might still leave or betray you. A great song, by contrast, would talk
to you—
and its truths would
never
betray you. At 3 A.M., outside of the greatest and most sinful sex, there was nothing that could mean as much as a pop song that told you secrets about your own fucked-up and yearning heart.

    A FEW YEARS AGO, after the publication of
Shot in the Heart
(a story about my family’s generational history of violence), I received several letters from readers asking me to compile some of my earlier writings for publication. I didn’t much like the idea. I thought my pop writing was too disjointed and had covered too much musical stylistic terrain to work in any cohesive volume. Also, I’d just finished a book about looking back at my past. I wasn’t anxious to start another—especially since reading my old writings always made my skin crawl. Instead, I preferred to write my own original history about rock & roll’s epic patterns of disruption, but that idea didn’t excite most of the people I talked to. After all, it was a season when pundits like Allan Bloom and William Bennett could write depthless and malicious indictments of popular culture and achieve fame and success for doing so. A history (and defense) of rock’s agitation did not prove an appealing idea to most editors.
    Then, following an article I wrote for
Rolling Stone
in 1996 about the death of Timothy Leary, I again received requests for a collection of writings. I felt a little more receptive to the idea by that time, because I knew I had a handful of articles I’d like to see enjoy a second (if only brief) life. At first, though, the process of selecting those articles was not fun. I’m a big believer that one should
never
read too much of one’s own writing; you begin to see all the repetitions, all the flaws. A week into the project, I felt like bailing out. Also, I’d written so much about some subjects—such as Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, punk, and Bruce Springsteen—that I wasn’t sure which piece (or pieces) to pick as the most representative.
    Then one morning, about 2 A.M. (my favorite hour—that is, next to 3 A.M.), I came to understand something that should have been apparent all along: Without realizing it, I had been writing my own version of a rock & roll history for over a generation. I began to see how I could collect some of my preferred (at least to my tastes) writings, yet also refashion them to construct an outline, a shadow, of rock & roll history—and that is what I have tried to do here. This is not, of course, a proper history of rock & roll; there is far too much that is not addressed in this book as widely as it should be (including blues, punk, jazz, and hip-hop—all of which have been great adventures that have made rock & roll count for even more). Instead, I’ve tried to construct a volume out of a mix of personal touchstones (Bob Dylan, John Lydon, Lou Reed, and others), interview encounters (such as the Clash, Sinéad O’Connor, Miles Davis, and Keith Jarrett), and a sampling of critical indulgences (Feargal Sharkey and Marianne Faithfull’s “Trouble in Mind,” among the latter). Some of these pieces are printed here pretty close to their original published form, but most have been revised, reassembled, rewritten, or newly thought out. The Bob Dylan chapter, for example, includes elements from over twenty-three years of articles I’ve written about Dylan, plus many new passages.
    I’ve tried to put it all together in an orderly way that might make for a story arc of sorts, from Elvis Presley’s invention and weird fame to Kurt Cobain, and the horrible costs of
his
inventions and weird fame. A Starting Place: A July Afternoon, is about Elvis, where it