The Test Tube and the Scale

  From the time of Liberace’s postwar popularity, the piano has come to play multi-faceted roles in popular music. From an instrument of grossly simplistic, kitsch derived, populist entertainment—Liberace, Roger Williams, Floyd Cramer—to a stationary force of rhythmic bombast—Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis—the piano has gratifyingly served the human impulse to express our emotional venture in exalted musical terms. Somewhere between both poles falls a quartet of commercially successful masters—Billy Joel, Elton John, Barry Manilow, Stevie Wonder—whose talents for audience engagement helps explain the likable proficiency of the bulk of their songwriting output. Could It Be Magic opens the second side of Barry Manilow’s debut record, and your feelings about the song could be wholly dependent upon your feelings for camp. I’m tempted to say that Could It Be Magic is easy listening’s Stairway To Heaven, but not even Robert Plant is shameless enough a lyricist to conceptualize the metap...

  A small and tan box radio sat atop my mother’s refrigerator in the small kitchen that sat on the western side of the house she shared with my father. It was the one object in that kitchen from which all domestic energy on that houseside discreetly emanated, a sort of low frequency buzz field that held either our direct or ambient attention. Anyone living inside that house was affected by this strange totem in intensely different ways, but I can only speak for myself when I share the memory of how it acted as a kind of lymph for my rapidly emerging pre-teen sexuality, becoming a more integral part of my childhood than the crucifix, its counter totem in that grossly supernatural household. I was radicalized by American radio in the nineteen seventies—a late century, late millennial epoch in which American cultural history summoned from its own unsettling past a Dionysian energy that culminated in a unifying national renaissance we’re likely never to experience again. Our house was ...

  What begins as a critique of Western imperialism becomes, in an epiphanic flash, a disclosure of empathy. Conquistador generates real listener excitement from its outset, a four beat introduction leading to Gary Brooker’s interrogative vocal, the sort of imploring probe we apply to all historical documentation as it begins revealing its sonorous evidence of real time narratives. Keith Reid’s lyric opens with an unnamed narrator’s first glimpse of the titular war monument, along with the biased observation, “like some angel’s hallowed brow, you reek of purity.” The line suggests a candidly modern skepticism of archaic European explorers’ destiny, a humanist perspective of the pompous colonialist ideal. Together with Robin Trower’s rhythm guitar and Brooker’s piano, staccato rhythm propels the narrator’s tale as it drifts from the present to the distant past and back again, a through line from the conqueror’s quixotic mission-oriented drive to the narrator’s steely, clear-eyed hist...

  If, out of the great American R&B record labels, Motown represented the hope-filled, sanguine possibilities of racial integration, and Stax the inner strength of black—and thus, human—consciousness, then Philadelphia International Records conveyed a fantasy of our easy surrender to sensual imperatives against an urban backdrop. Before the label could find its voice, however, there came a brief period of emulation of commercially proven models, and the mid-late sixties model for intersex, R&B duets was Motown’s Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Ersatz beauty is a common enough occurrence in rock and roll, so when it appears to us without guise, it’s as a sui generis aberration, and we never fully recover from its initial shock. The harmonies of Gaye and Terrell, though ubiquitous in the collective memory, have never been normalized to the extent that their appearance inspires fatigue in the manner of some overly familiar Motown mainstays. In a similar style, Bunny Sigler and ...

The death of childhood innocence is a necessary requisite for initiation into the rock and roll experience. Our passage into adolescence, marked by the hormonal flush, advances another tick on the global death clock, and an unidentifiable terror somewhere in the glandular regions of the earth’s core is released, sending an orgasmic shiver along the spine of children learning for the first time the excitement of self, the gift of our destructive inner power, the imagination. The Goodees, a Memphis girl group trio, released their single Condition Red after winning a local talent contest held by Stax as part of the inauguration of their offshoot label Hip in 1967. Condition Red is a slightly less melodramatic reworking of the Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack, the great mid-sixties ballad of a young motorcyclist’s final ride, memorialized by his girlfriend Betty, whose parents martyrized Jimmy after forbidding her to see him. The concept of teenage rebellion, the pivot around which girl gro...

Flamboyance is a stylized form of provocation that presents itself as one of beauty’s many proxies, intimidating and surreal. Affording her customary, invaluable perspective, Flannery O’Connor was quoted, saying, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one…it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” The same, obviously, can be said about the freak’s place in rock and roll. Our most flamboyant performers—from Jerry Lee Lewis and Janis Joplin to Ozzy Osbourne and Prince—often went to veritably comic lengths to reflect the grotesquerie of our passions, parodying our struggles with expression, and, most importantly, eradicating our fantasies of self-importance, replaced on the rock and roll stage with unadorned humanity, the essence of which remains with us despite the prevalence of    less talented ...