The Test Tube and the Scale

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 ...