Samples from Into the Mystic...
on the English Invasion
"But of all the revenant British pasts that returned in the sixties, one era seemed especially close—the hinge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the end of Victoria’s reign to the First World War, a strange dreaming time of fin de siècle whose vapors were only cleared by the shock of World War I. It was the era of the occult revival, of artistic revolt against bourgeois life and for the irrational, of the great English ghost story, and, as we’ve seen, the golden age of English children’s literature. Its revival in the sixties could be seen in the Edwardian shop names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, in the fashions that one newspaper writer sniffed were those of “English homosexuals of the Mauve Decade” (indeed the dandy was seen again on the streets of London); and in the names of albums (Pink Floyd named their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn after the most mystical chapter of The Wind in the Willows). As Ian MacDonald said, the “true subject of English psychedelia was neither love nor drugs, but nostalgia for the innocent vision of the child.”
on the Beach Boys
"On Shut Down Volume 2, ostensibly another album of hot- rod songs, you can hear the Beach Boys turn a corner. The album starts with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” a paean to the exciting notion of a girl winning the hot- rod race. But a couple of cuts later, Brian has left the strip and, alone in his room, is singing in an ethereal setting, I have the warmth of the sun within me at night . . . The California sun, the focus of Brian Wilson’s world, has become an interior sun. Before, the elements of the southern California environment, the sun and sea and the streets, were adjuncts to, or instruments for, pleasure; now they begin to suggest inner states—-- poignance, longing, wonder. This interiorization of the golden glow deepens the affective power of the Beach Boys’ California. Wilson soon brings in Phil Spector’s studio musicians, the builders of the famous “wall of sound,” and uses them to give his songs rhapsodic color. By the time the Beach Boys come to the album Beach Boys Today in 1965, the teen energy of the Del Mar beaches and the cruising strips has been sublimated. The attitude has gone from the brag of “I Get Around” to inward-looking songs with titles like “She Knows Me Too Well,” “In the Back of My Mind” and “Please Let Me Wonder.” And the celebratory songs took on new richness. When the Beach Boys reach the Technicolor chorus of “Do You Wanna Dance?” the invitation feels like a vast exhalation, a huge wall of breath, the sound of a people relaxing, as if, having reached the end of all striving, there was only one question worth asking: Will you join the dance?"
on the Beatles
"The Beatles weren’t bluesmen. Their music they were drawn to didn’t have to do with finding ways to endure life. Their music was about finding a source of power, power that could contend with, even overcome, the dead-end world of the Reeperbahn. This is what they found when they discovered that by playing hard enough, by mercilessly overdriving the top boost tone of their Vox AC30 amps, they could batter their way through the anomie of the Indra Club, conquer and enlist the hardened, indifferent crowd, with noise and beat and their shout. They didn’t even have to play well. They just had to play with all their power. In Hamburg, they started to become the greatest singers in rock and roll, and their vocal style, especially John’s, was born of the sheer, obsessive desperation to push it as far as they could. It’s why no-one—no garage band or punks or thrashers—can get inside the sheer on-the-edge dementia of John Lennon’s rock and roll. You can hear it in “Twist and Shout”—the sound of a singer who has reached the outermost edge of his ability to get across, and then in sheer desperation, goes beyond it, tearing his larynx to get a response, past caring how he sounds, not willing to let go until hysteria, or ecstasy, has been reached. It was this that finally got the attention of the denizens of the Indra and the Kaiserkeller, this that opened a new world for rock and roll."
on the Rolling Stones
"The Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour has become the pattern of rock-and-roll acting on and in the world. Frodo against Mordor. Dionysus against Thebes. Christ against Jerusalem. Jack enters giant country (“I smell the blood of an Englishman”). Jack Straw enters London on the carnival day of Corpus Christi. The Fool against the Empire. The dizzying asymmetry between the fortress and the challenger is what catches the breath. Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel, the Times of London had asked after seeing Mick in Wormwood Scrubs. The United States was one huge iron-cogged wheel, and the butterfly in his motley silks was coming to it, the Lord of Misrule leading the whole old European train of costumed riot behind him. And so the Stones arrived at the final dark carnival, in California at the end of the world, at the end of the year, at the end of the sixties."
on Bob Dylan
"The last two songs on Highway 61, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row,” feel related, as if they’re telling one story, about a season in Hell. The story might go something like this: The hero takes a bus to some desolated and hopeless corner of the continent, where every other American fugitive, junkie, and loser washes up. Maybe like Lee Oswald two years before, he takes a bus across the Mexican border. He is looking to find out the cost of living inside the myth, to see if he can stand it. “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too,” hanging out in a small hot dingy room looking over someplace he calls Desolation Row.
Sweet Melinda
the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
and she invites you up into her room.
And you’re so kind
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon. . . .
He survives, but changed. He’s passed through the initiation of the American night and is finally a kind of seer. His folk-rock is the fruit of his initiation. He knows the sound he wants—the “thin wild mercury sound,” he calls it. It is nothing like the Byrds. The Byrds deal in silver; Dylan’s folk-rock is gilt, the gilded rococo of a circus wagon, with an echo of calliope and whorehouse pianos, Spanish guitars, Salvation Army brass, Sanctified Church organ. And a hard, bluesy garage-rock bed under it. Strangely enough, at the moment, it is what people want to hear. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a hit, and the stories find an audience, big beyond Dylan’s reckoning.
For people who absorb Bob Dylan’s mid-sixties music, it becomes difficult to observe history with a single vision again. He has held up X-rays of America’s head, where you can see the disastrous split between the lobes, the two histories, enacted where everyone can see them.
on the MC5
"Few people come to the end of Kick Out the Jams without feeling that they have experienced something. I mean something other than, or more than, an aesthetic experience. What I mean is, even the most intense aesthetic experiences are still once removed from primary, firsthand experience. Reading the most powerful description of being punched in the face can never have the impact of being really punched in the face. But Kick Out the Jams in a way breaks through the aesthetic buffer. You feel as if something has happened to you. You’re a little traumatized but in a good way. The feeling is something like a kind of surprise, kind of spooky, like observing an anomalous phenomenon actually presented for close observation, as if a real alien had sat down for an interview or the Loch Ness monster had swum up to the dock and offered DNA samples. But of course if that happened it would have implications beyond just the monster. It would be the thin end of a wedge that might eventually crack open the ordinary world and offer a new range of possibilities. With the MC5 there is the added factor that the phenomenon not only astonishes but does you good, is vivifying. When you are done with Kick Out the Jams, you have a conviction. It may be hard to articulate, but you know something now, something has been demonstrated for you through your own experience, beyond argument, something good. You have a sense of a thing you can count on that you weren’t sure of before. The MC5 have testified. You are better off than you were."
on the English Invasion
"But of all the revenant British pasts that returned in the sixties, one era seemed especially close—the hinge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the end of Victoria’s reign to the First World War, a strange dreaming time of fin de siècle whose vapors were only cleared by the shock of World War I. It was the era of the occult revival, of artistic revolt against bourgeois life and for the irrational, of the great English ghost story, and, as we’ve seen, the golden age of English children’s literature. Its revival in the sixties could be seen in the Edwardian shop names like I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, in the fashions that one newspaper writer sniffed were those of “English homosexuals of the Mauve Decade” (indeed the dandy was seen again on the streets of London); and in the names of albums (Pink Floyd named their first album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn after the most mystical chapter of The Wind in the Willows). As Ian MacDonald said, the “true subject of English psychedelia was neither love nor drugs, but nostalgia for the innocent vision of the child.”
on the Beach Boys
"On Shut Down Volume 2, ostensibly another album of hot- rod songs, you can hear the Beach Boys turn a corner. The album starts with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” a paean to the exciting notion of a girl winning the hot- rod race. But a couple of cuts later, Brian has left the strip and, alone in his room, is singing in an ethereal setting, I have the warmth of the sun within me at night . . . The California sun, the focus of Brian Wilson’s world, has become an interior sun. Before, the elements of the southern California environment, the sun and sea and the streets, were adjuncts to, or instruments for, pleasure; now they begin to suggest inner states—-- poignance, longing, wonder. This interiorization of the golden glow deepens the affective power of the Beach Boys’ California. Wilson soon brings in Phil Spector’s studio musicians, the builders of the famous “wall of sound,” and uses them to give his songs rhapsodic color. By the time the Beach Boys come to the album Beach Boys Today in 1965, the teen energy of the Del Mar beaches and the cruising strips has been sublimated. The attitude has gone from the brag of “I Get Around” to inward-looking songs with titles like “She Knows Me Too Well,” “In the Back of My Mind” and “Please Let Me Wonder.” And the celebratory songs took on new richness. When the Beach Boys reach the Technicolor chorus of “Do You Wanna Dance?” the invitation feels like a vast exhalation, a huge wall of breath, the sound of a people relaxing, as if, having reached the end of all striving, there was only one question worth asking: Will you join the dance?"
on the Beatles
"The Beatles weren’t bluesmen. Their music they were drawn to didn’t have to do with finding ways to endure life. Their music was about finding a source of power, power that could contend with, even overcome, the dead-end world of the Reeperbahn. This is what they found when they discovered that by playing hard enough, by mercilessly overdriving the top boost tone of their Vox AC30 amps, they could batter their way through the anomie of the Indra Club, conquer and enlist the hardened, indifferent crowd, with noise and beat and their shout. They didn’t even have to play well. They just had to play with all their power. In Hamburg, they started to become the greatest singers in rock and roll, and their vocal style, especially John’s, was born of the sheer, obsessive desperation to push it as far as they could. It’s why no-one—no garage band or punks or thrashers—can get inside the sheer on-the-edge dementia of John Lennon’s rock and roll. You can hear it in “Twist and Shout”—the sound of a singer who has reached the outermost edge of his ability to get across, and then in sheer desperation, goes beyond it, tearing his larynx to get a response, past caring how he sounds, not willing to let go until hysteria, or ecstasy, has been reached. It was this that finally got the attention of the denizens of the Indra and the Kaiserkeller, this that opened a new world for rock and roll."
on the Rolling Stones
"The Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour has become the pattern of rock-and-roll acting on and in the world. Frodo against Mordor. Dionysus against Thebes. Christ against Jerusalem. Jack enters giant country (“I smell the blood of an Englishman”). Jack Straw enters London on the carnival day of Corpus Christi. The Fool against the Empire. The dizzying asymmetry between the fortress and the challenger is what catches the breath. Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel, the Times of London had asked after seeing Mick in Wormwood Scrubs. The United States was one huge iron-cogged wheel, and the butterfly in his motley silks was coming to it, the Lord of Misrule leading the whole old European train of costumed riot behind him. And so the Stones arrived at the final dark carnival, in California at the end of the world, at the end of the year, at the end of the sixties."
on Bob Dylan
"The last two songs on Highway 61, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Desolation Row,” feel related, as if they’re telling one story, about a season in Hell. The story might go something like this: The hero takes a bus to some desolated and hopeless corner of the continent, where every other American fugitive, junkie, and loser washes up. Maybe like Lee Oswald two years before, he takes a bus across the Mexican border. He is looking to find out the cost of living inside the myth, to see if he can stand it. “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too,” hanging out in a small hot dingy room looking over someplace he calls Desolation Row.
Sweet Melinda
the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English
and she invites you up into her room.
And you’re so kind
And careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice
And leaves you howling at the moon. . . .
He survives, but changed. He’s passed through the initiation of the American night and is finally a kind of seer. His folk-rock is the fruit of his initiation. He knows the sound he wants—the “thin wild mercury sound,” he calls it. It is nothing like the Byrds. The Byrds deal in silver; Dylan’s folk-rock is gilt, the gilded rococo of a circus wagon, with an echo of calliope and whorehouse pianos, Spanish guitars, Salvation Army brass, Sanctified Church organ. And a hard, bluesy garage-rock bed under it. Strangely enough, at the moment, it is what people want to hear. “Like a Rolling Stone” is a hit, and the stories find an audience, big beyond Dylan’s reckoning.
For people who absorb Bob Dylan’s mid-sixties music, it becomes difficult to observe history with a single vision again. He has held up X-rays of America’s head, where you can see the disastrous split between the lobes, the two histories, enacted where everyone can see them.
on the MC5
"Few people come to the end of Kick Out the Jams without feeling that they have experienced something. I mean something other than, or more than, an aesthetic experience. What I mean is, even the most intense aesthetic experiences are still once removed from primary, firsthand experience. Reading the most powerful description of being punched in the face can never have the impact of being really punched in the face. But Kick Out the Jams in a way breaks through the aesthetic buffer. You feel as if something has happened to you. You’re a little traumatized but in a good way. The feeling is something like a kind of surprise, kind of spooky, like observing an anomalous phenomenon actually presented for close observation, as if a real alien had sat down for an interview or the Loch Ness monster had swum up to the dock and offered DNA samples. But of course if that happened it would have implications beyond just the monster. It would be the thin end of a wedge that might eventually crack open the ordinary world and offer a new range of possibilities. With the MC5 there is the added factor that the phenomenon not only astonishes but does you good, is vivifying. When you are done with Kick Out the Jams, you have a conviction. It may be hard to articulate, but you know something now, something has been demonstrated for you through your own experience, beyond argument, something good. You have a sense of a thing you can count on that you weren’t sure of before. The MC5 have testified. You are better off than you were."