Week Thirteen: Early Seventies

The End For Many

Pere Lachaise, the Paris cemetery, has long appealed to romantic sensibilities. Opened in the early years of the nineteenth century, it was a necropolis at the gates of bohemia's capital, the bur­ial site of choice for bourgeois businessmen wealthy enough to lease a plot, and the last stop for a lot of celebrated saints and sinners, lovers and artists, from Eloise and Abelard to Nerval and Proust, Os­car Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, Gertrude Stein and Edith Piaf (per­haps the most beloved of France's popular singers in the twentieth century). For several years, the most frequently visited site in the cemetery belonged to Allan Kardec, a French spiritualist renowned for his ability to negotiate the boundaries between life and death. Kardec's cult, however, was no match for that which gathered, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, round the grave of a dead American rock star, Jim Morrison of the Doors.

His death was made public on July 5, 1971. Officially, it was said that his heart had failed two days earlier. But friends, and most fans, knew better. A paragon of excess, Morrison in the last years of his short life (he was twenty-seven years old) had committed himself to binges of heavy drinking and drug-taking, fancying himself a poet maudit like Rimbaud, high on the nectar of oblivion.

In his prime, performing in 1967 and 1968 as the lead singer of the Doors, he had looked like a Greek god, with a face of angelic sweetness and long tresses of beautiful flowing hair. But he had al­ways acted like a man possessed, prowling the stage in leather pants, high on acid or stoned on pot or smashed on whiskey, trying to live up to his credo: "I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos—especially activity that seems to have no meaning."

To many fans, Morrison's death seemed perfectly logical, a fine finishing touch to a suicidal work of art. After his death, a cult slowly formed around his memory. For the first time in its history, Pere Lachaise began to be mobbed. The cemetery became the fourth most popular place to visit in Paris (after Versailles, the Louvre, and the Eiffel Tower). And the anniversary of Morrison's death became an annual occasion for bacchanalian orgies conducted by amiably besotted young mourners. Faithful to his uncouth code of living, fans desecrated the cemetery with graffiti: ACID RULES; MORRISON THIS WAY; JIM WAS A JUNKIE; THIS IS NOT THE END.

As the years passed, and the pilgrims kept flocking to the grave site, the cult grew ever bigger. A decade after his death, his band was more popular than ever, not least with listeners too young to have seen or heard the Doors in their heyday. In 1980, a biography of Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, became a best-selling book in the United States. And in 1991, twenty years after his death, Hollywood paid Morrison its highest compliment: Oliver Stone, an Academy Award-winning director, exalted the singer's life, and death, in his film The Doors.

"He was Dionysus come to earth, a shaman in a foreign body," a "rock star and poet," a "genius and holy fool"—so says Danny Sugerman in a new preface to the twenty-ninth printing of No One Here Gets Out Alive. Unfortunately, a disinterested reader of that book would be hard-pressed to describe Morrison as anything other than a monumental jerk.

When Oliver Stone directed his film The Doors, he faced the same problem, posed by the same set of brute facts. Intended as a loving homage, Stone's film offers an inadvertent parody, a portrait of an amateur oracle's excruciatingly dull metamorphosis into a pitiful, drunken slob—not what Nietzsche had in mind when he invoked Dionysus.

It had all begun with a heady vision, a fantasy of making a music of sublime destructiveness, unleashing orgies of "sexual licentious­ness," subverting "family life and its venerable traditions," exploring "the most savage natural instincts" in songs that celebrated "that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty"—notions of Nietzsche that fascinated Ray Manzarek, a classically trained keyboard player who in 1965 decided to start a rock band.

Looking for help, Manzarek turned to Jim Morrison, a classmate in film school. That summer, during a stroll along Venice Beach (rhapsodically depicted in Stone's film), Morrison, an aspiring poet, sang Manzarek a new song—and the two young men then and there "decided to get a group together and make a million dollars" (as the organist remarked in a 1968 interview). To complete the lineup they recruited John Densmore, a young jazz-oriented drummer, and Rob­bie Krieger, a guitarist familiar with flamenco as well as the electric blues style made popular by the Rolling Stones. Morrison and Man­zarek called their band the Doors—an allusion to a phrase of William Blake's ("There are things that are known and things that are unknown; in between are doors"), and also to The Doors of Per­ception, Aldous Huxley's account of his experiments with mescaline.

Playing first at dives on Sunset Strip, and then at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, Hollywood's premier pop music showcase, the Doors at­tracted a following large enough to provoke interest from record labels. Signed by a small but trend-setting folk-rock label, Elektra, the Doors released their first album in January 1967. Titled simply The Doors, it was a solid debut. The songs ran a gamut from the bawdy blues of Howlin' Wolf ("Backdoor Man") to the Weimar cabaret music oi Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht ("Alabama Song"), with new songs smartly alluding to the beauties of both dope ("Crys­tal Ship") and French literature ("The End of the Night," a nod to­ward the novel by Celine). But what jumped out were the two longest tracks on the album, "Light My Fire," a largely instrumental set of ecstatic variations on a modal riff, and "The End," a creepy lit­tle ballad that had evolved, in the course of countless acid-soaked live performances, into a weird, quasi-Oriental epic of lust and mor­bid longing, with nonsense blues verses punctuated by a shockingly explicit violation of what Freud had regarded as the primal taboo: "Father I want to kill you. Mother, I want to ... Aar-r-r-g-g-g-h-h!"

The album's jacket photo of Morrison could not have been pret­tier. And in the spring of 1967, as a shortened version of "Light My Fire" began to climb toward the top of the American chart of best-selling singles, reporters flocked around the boyish beauty with Bot­ticelli looks and a shocking song about incest, begging for quotes.

"I think there's a whole region of images and feelings inside us that rarely are given outlet in daily life," Morrison explained of the band and its music. "And when they do come out, they can take per­verse forms. It's the dark side. . . . The more civilized we get on the surface, the more the other forces make their plea. We appeal to the same human needs as classical tragedy and early Southern blues. Think of it as a seance in an environment that has become hostile to life: cold, restrictive. People feel they're dying in a bad landscape. People gather together in seance in order to invoke, palliate, and drive away the dead. Through chanting, singing, dancing and music, they try to cure an illness, to bring harmony back into the world."

On one level, Jim Morrison was Ken Kesey's dream come true: a sex symbol who was also a pop apostle of the "other side"—a world to be won through the open use of mind-bending drugs. And in the summer of 1967, while Kesey's original ragtag band of disciples, the Grateful Dead, struggled (without notable success) to reach the larger rock au­dience, the Doors were making the rounds of American network tele­vision.

Invited to appear on The Ed Sullivan Show, Morrison was asked to omit a double entendre, an obvious drug reference, in one of the lines in "Light My Fire." He promised that he would—and then broke his promise, leering at the camera, and very clearly enunciating the troublesome word: "higher." In the United States, where it was easy to associate Morrison's conventionally handsome good looks with an all-American pedigree (he was in fact the son of a high-rank­ing U.S. naval officer), the effect was startling: it was as if Ozzie and Harriet's boy-next-door had dropped acid and started snarling ob­scenities.

But it soon enough became clear that Jim Morrison was no Merry Prankster, though not for want of trying. The trouble was with his audience. Far from being converted to a new view of the cosmos, most of them took "Light My Fire," even in 1967, as a cool new ode to sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Even "The End" ruffled few feath­ers: after all, here was a really cute guy behaving in a really gross way—a type tolerated, even beloved, at the fraternity parties com­mon on America's college campuses, where young men traditionally have sowed their wild oats.

As the Doors crisscrossed America, the crowds kept growing. Irri­tated by the prevailing mood of recreational hedonism, Morrison on stage became wilder and wilder. He got in the habit of hurling him­self from the stage. During one famously chaotic concert (in New Haven, Connecticut, in December 1967), he berated the local con­stabulary, who responded with an outburst of old-fashioned vio­lence, beating up the singer after they had arrested him. Mind expansion became a distant memory, as Morrison cut back his intake of pot and acid, and stepped up his drinking. Sometimes he was mes­merizing. Sometimes he simply blacked out.

From the start, of course, rock and roll had entered into a Faust-ian pact with chaotic impulses. For Wynonie Harris, as his loyal fans well understood, "Good Rockin' Tonight" meant fast living and hard drinking. Alan Freed had launched his career with a riot. But during his own descent into intoxicated self-destruction, Jim Morri­son set entirely new standards for disorderly conduct, standards that have remained the envy of every subsequent rock and roll avatar of excess (one thinks of punk bands like the Sex Pistols, and later hard rock bands like Guns n' Roses).

The man who would have been Dionysus became, instead, a figure far closer in spirit to John Belushi's character Bluto, the comic paragon of grossness in the film Animal House. "Pecos Bill, Mighty Joe Young and John Henry would be proud to share the volume of outrageous and semi-heroic acts attributed to Morrison," the critic Digby Diehl shrewdly remarked in a piece about the Doors published in 1968: "In addition to prodigious feats of sexuality, he is credited with some bizarre episodes of exhibitionism. At an Ivy League university, Morrison climbed the sixteen-story bell tower with a willing lass; and in a moment of exuberance, swung out on the bell tower shutter, 200 feet above the heads of terrified onlookers—all this stark naked."

When DiehJ asked Morrison about his behavior, he explained that his fans demanded it, and that to meet their demands, he now found it "necessary to project more, to exaggerate—almost to the point of grotesqueness."

About appearing grotesque, Morrison had no inhibitions. More and more, he was too drunk to care, and unconcerned, with good reason, about occasionally unpleasant consequences. One night, for example, he drove his car into a tree. Staggering from the vehicle, he summoned an employee to clean up the mess, calm the police, and take him home. Such are the prerogatives of a rock and roll star.

Concerts became an ordeal for the rest of the Doors, who never knew what to expect. But crowds kept coming to the concerts. They were like spectators at an auto race, waiting for a crash.

The crack-up, when it came, was abhorrent, absurd, pathetic. The occasion was a concert staged in an empty airplane hangar in Miami, Florida. It was a steamy night in March 1969, and the promoters had removed every seat in order to sell tickets to the largest possible number of paying customers. With show time nearing, Jim Morrison was nowhere to be seen.

Planning to meet the Doors in Florida, he had spent the previous night in Los Angeles attending Paradise Now, an aggressively experi­mental piece performed by the Living Theater. Inspired by the French playwright Antonin Artaud and his ideas about a "theater of cru­elty," and also hoping to negotiate the boundary normally fixed be­tween the artists on stage and the viewers in the audience, the Living Theater in Paradise Now aimed to shock: taunting the spectators, de­nouncing their slavish passivity, their shame at their own animal im­pulses, the actors feigned fucking, daring the crowd to join them.

When it was all over, Morrison was tired but elated—and primed to emulate the troupe's shock tactics. Preparing to leave for Miami the next morning, he got into a violent row with his longtime girl­friend, Pamela Courson, the only woman up to loving him and hat­ing him with the ferocity that he demanded. Missing his scheduled flight, he took the next available plane and started to drink, tossing back cocktail after cocktail as the jet winged its way toward Florida.

By the time he got to the venue, he was barely coherent and agonizingly late, arriving long after the show had been scheduled to start. The other members of the band were understandably angry. The sold-out audience, crammed together like cattle in a pen, was tired of waiting, and eager for a stiff dose of musical excitement.

The singer, taking a mask from his own ancient gallery of Dionysian disguises, stumbled on stage, his instincts boiling, his thoughts blurred. While the band vamped on a blues riff, the singer, in a half-conscious parody of Paradise Now, baited and berated the audience. "You're all a bunch of fuckin' idiots!" he bellowed. "You're all a bunch of slaves!"

The crowd tittered. Slaves just want to have fun.

The master was too drunk to put over a message of psychic meta­morphosis and social transformation. After a desultory effort to de­liver more or less recognizable versions of some of the songs the crowd had come to hear, Morrison slipped back into a harangue.

"There are no rules!" he shouted, shortly after singing one of his most famous lines, from one of the Doors' most celebrated songs: "We want the world and we want it now!"

A guest walked on stage and handed Morrison a cute baby lamb—a prop meant to provoke a plea for nonviolence and vegetari­anism.

"I'd fuck her but she's too young," quipped Morrison. Inured to such outbursts, unlike the intellectuals who had been shocked by the Living Theater the night before in L.A., the good old boys in the crowd whooped and hollered, just like their frat brothers had for "Tutti Frutti" a decade before.

At wit's end, and perhaps as part of a previously planned stunt, Morrison pushed his level of contemptuous exhibitionism up another notch.

As the other members of the band, conceding defeat after clocking in an hour of aimless music-making on stage, started to leave, Morri­son resumed his harangue, surrounded now by a number of fans whom he had finally coaxed into joining him on stage.

Somebody poured champagne over Morrison, who stripped off his shirt, now soaking wet. "You didn't come here for music, did you? You came for something more, didn't you? You didn't come to rock 'n' roll, you came for something else, didn't you? You came for something else. WHAT IS IT?"

The crowd roiled and roared.

"You want to see my cock, don't you?"

A member of the Doors' stage crew rushed over to Morrison and grabbed the belt on his pants, pulling up so that he couldn't pull down.

"YEAHHHH!!!" he shouted, waving his wet shirt in front of his crotch. "See it? DID YOU SEE IT?"

The crowd on the floor surged forward. The throng on stage heaved Morrison over the edge. Landing with a thud, he recovered his balance and proceeded to lead several thousand fans in a snake dance.

In an interview shortly before his death, Morrison would call it one of his finest moments. "I think that was the culmination, in a way, of our mass performing career. Subconsciously, I think I was trying to get across in that concert—I was trying to reduce it to an absurdity, and it worked too well."

Years later, the band's drummer, John Densmore, writing in his memoir Riders on the Storm, offered a completely different assess­ment: " 'There's a point beyond which we cannot return. That is the point that must be reached,' Kafka once wrote. Morrison had finally reached it. He had become the cockroach."

Whether one regards the Miami show as a zenith or a nadir, things were never the same—not for Morrison, and not for the Doors.

Four days later, a legal complaint was filed in Miami, charging Morrison with lewd and lascivious behavior, indecent exposure, open profanity, and public drunkenness. Across the country, as news­papers picked up the story, concerts were canceled, invitations to perform withdrawn. The Doors were now a band without a venue.

They struggled to carry on, but Morrison, despite sporadic bursts of energy and interest, had become hopelessly bored by his own fame. Even in a recording studio, he was unable to focus on the mu­sic, offering instead uncouth parodies of blues phrasing. Not un­aware of what was happening to himself, and still facing the threat of jail for the show in Miami, Morrison flew to Paris in the spring of 1971, apparently hoping that a sojourn in Rimbaud's native land might break his own free fall into oblivion.

The change of scenery didn't work. And so, on July 3, 1971, after a night of hard drinking and (if one can trust the most plausible pub­lished accounts) snorting heroin, he finally reached The End "of laughter and soft lies/the end of nights we tried to die."

In 1967, when the world first heard Jim Morrison sing these lines, the sentiments seemed bold and brave, a bracing tonic for a youth culture besotted on a sappy mix of love, peace, and drugged-out bliss.

Four years later, the lines took on a different aura, of self-loathing and involuntary self-revelation. "Our music is like someone not quite at home, not quite relaxed," Morrison once remarked; and so it seemed to be, not least for him.

At the pinnacle of his early fame, Morrison had tried to cast him­self willy-nilly as a tragic hero, waging a war on limits. For a mo­ment, in the summer of 1967, that had seemed a war worth waging: a generation, inspired in part by the rock and roll heroes it wor­shipped, had dreamed of creating new men and new women, undi­vided, without shame, each one in tune with a unique constellation of animal instincts and creative desires.

But the moment passed. The tragic hero turned himself into a pitiable clown. And the myth of the Doors was reabsorbed by the popular culture it was meant to challenge.

Ten years after Morrison's death, in 1981, Rolling Stone, the most prestigious of the American rock periodicals spawned by the abortive cultural revolution of the Sixties, featured a beautiful photo of the rock idol as a Greek god on its cover, with the headline "He's Hot, He's Sexy, He's Dead." "The most important aspect of Morrison Resurrectus," explained the reporter, "is the need today for kids— perhaps all of us—to have an idol who isn't squeaky clean."

Or, as the Doors' Densmore summed up the gist of the piece, and the main maxim of rock and roll ethics in the decades after Morri­son's romantic apotheosis: "Permission to party. Well done, Dio­nysus."

As the end of the millennium drew near, pilgrims continued to flock to Morrison's grave in Pere Lachaise. On July 3, 1991, the twentieth anniversary of his death, nearly a thousand fans gathered outside the gates to the cemetery. Fearing a disturbance, the police had closed the grounds for the day. As midnight approached, some of the fans began to hurl beer bottles at the cops. After using a car as a battering ram to break into the park, fans set the car on fire. In the melee that followed, three people were injured, and twenty-one ar­rested.

The managers of the cemetery shortly afterward announced that, when the term of the Morrison estate's lease on the burial site came up, on July 6, 2001, it would not be renewed. The family would have to move the singer's remains somewhere else.

In France's most famous City of the Dead, at least, the revels would finally be finished. And the cultists, the pilgrims still in search of chaos and freedom, would have to find a new place to worship their holy fool—the most wayward saint yet in the rock and roll pan­theon.

Glam Rock

By the end of the Sixties, the Beatles and their disciples had transformed, almost beyond recognition, the world of rock and roll. What once had been dismissed as a form of entertainment suit­able mainly for kids was now often credited as a form of culture fit even for discerning adults. In the course of the decade, the music had produced a long string of glamorous celebrities, widely regarded as symbols of some larger social significance, from Mick Jagger to Mar-vin Gaye and Jim Morrison. These rock stars rivaled any coming from Hollywood—and without having to make demeaning films, like Elvis Presley. At the same time, the keynote acts of the Monterey Pop Festival—Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix—had subsequently turned a handsome profit for the companies that sold their record­ings, confirming the high commercial value of commodities that could be sold to an avowedly anticommercial subculture. As never before, rock and roll was a potential source of cachet and cold, hard cash, combined.

Still, as the mind-expanding and money-making euphoria of the Sixties started to fade, a new mood, a kind of inchoate malaise, set­tled over the rock scene. The Beatles had officially dissolved in the spring of 1970, and by the end of the next year, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison had all died of various drug overdoses. In the months that followed, no rock act of remotely similar power and panache had presented itself, sending a small army of industry look­outs into a modest frenzy of worried scouting.

The goal by now was not just to find a hot new band, or even a wild new look, but also—and this was the great lesson learned at the Monterey Pop Festival—to discover a style of music as closely linked to a style of life as the music of the Grateful Dead had been linked to the subculture of San Francisco's psychedelic outlaws. Novelty of any sort, be it sociological or musical, now held out the promise of estab­lishing a new niche in the youth market.

The quest for "The Next Big Thing" was especially ardent in England. Though a relatively small country, England has, ever since the Beatles, played a disproportionately large role in the cultural econ­omy of rock. Since 1963, the looks and sounds fashionable with the island's youth have constantly changed, creating a febrile atmosphere of innovation, and a steady stream of new rock acts, generally more stylish, and startling, than those produced in the United States. At the start of the Seventies, England supported three rival rock week­lies, each one read by obsessive fans and businessmen hoping to ex­ploit their obsessions. With the right sort of publicity from the music press, and support from the country's concentrated network of radio and television outlets, a new British rock act could conceivably rede­fine the style of teen revolt in a manner of weeks—a feat all but im­possible in the United States.

On the night of July 9, 1972, London's media elite assembled in the Royal Festival Hall to see the latest rock and roll prospect. His name was David Bowie, and he'd created a stir in the previous weeks by giving an interview claiming that he was gay; by feigning fellatio with his guitarist on stage; and by wearing lipstick and mascara to go with a puffed ball of hair dyed a shocking shade of red.

As always at such events, the tone was set by a handful of industry heavyweights and media tastemakers. What made the evening unique was the highly visible presence in the audience of the gay press, and a large number of specially invited gay scene-makers. "The crowd isn't noticeably campy," Peter Holmes wrote afterward in London's leading gay paper, the Gay News—but the atmosphere, as Holmes evoked it, was nevertheless rich with erotic promise. Aftershave hung heavy in the air, and the compere, when he appeared on stage, announced that he had just had to fight his way through a forest of feather boas.

The lights dimmed, and the hall filled with the steely sound of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" in a space-age arrangement for electronic synthesizers, the same steely sounds heard on the soundtrack of A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick's lyrical ode to teenage violence in a world run by brainwashing bureaucrats.

Holmes captured the next moment: "A single spot picks out a thin, almost drawn jester. Red hair, black make-up and a skintight, red and green, Persian-carpet-print space suit. All this on top of red lace-up space boots. 'Hello, I'm Ziggy Stardust and these are the Spi­ders From Mars.' "

Thus spake "Ziggy"—and so began a new era in the packaging of rock and roll celebrities.

Ziggy, as played by Bowie, was a make-believe messiah, a walking publicity ploy, and a cuddly gay pinup, all rolled into one. Bowie had worked up the character in the preceding months, presenting it to the public at large a few weeks earlier, on the album he had called The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars—an al­bum widely hailed by critics in England, not least because of its overt theatrical ambitions and unmistakable aura of high seriousness.

"My performances have got to be theatrical experiences for me as well as for the audience," Bowie had explained to an American jour­nalist the year before, in the course of fielding questions about how he planned to revolutionize the field of rock and roll music. "I think it should be tarted up, made into a prostitute, a parody of itself," de­clared Bowie. "It should be the clown, the Pierrot medium. The mu­sic is the mask the message wears—music is the Pierrot, and I, the performer, am the message."

Inside the Royal Festival Hall, London's smart set beheld the new mask that Bowie's message was now wearing. Ziggy in boots was a parody of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and an insider's joke, as well, the stage name being an allusion to Iggy Pop (itself the stage name of James Osterberg, a crudely effective American rock and roll dare­devil, weaned on the ethos of the Velvet Underground and renowned for slashing and stabbing himself on stage in a bloody display of sick bravado).

Flanked by the Spiders (in fact, a trio of three journeymen rock musicians from Hull), Ziggy and his band roared into "Hang On to Yourself"—a curtain raiser with allegorical bite. A ghostly andro­gyne, Ziggy offered a pantomime of rock and roll anarchy, projecting a weird aura of icy detachment somehow combined with uninhibited impulsiveness. The band banged out a harshly metallic beat. The singer declaimed the song's lyrics in a broad cockney accent and with demotic exaggeration. The audience was being summoned to a carni­val of excess, a ritual of solidarity, an ecstatic loss of personal iden­tity—the sort of thing (not coincidentally) that does sometimes actually happen during rock and roll concerts.

The album that had introduced the Ziggy character had toyed with similar conceits in the controlled context of a studio produc­tion. Its most obvious precursor was the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, though the grammar of the title also recalls an­other musical, dramatizing another scene of self-destructive permis­siveness, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt as his preferred musical idiom. But even when he sang an elemental piece of classic rock and roll like Chuck Berry's "Around and Around" (a 1971 recording of this song, modeled on an earlier ver­sion by the Rolling Stones, was originally slated to form part of the Ziggy Stardust album), it was with a wink and a nod—as if in know­ing parody of rock and roll.

Watching Ziggy in action at the Royal Festival Hall and reporting for Melody Maker was Ray Coleman, the jazz buff who had been an early booster of the Beatles. The show was about the making and un­making of an absurdly overblown, fictive pop star. But Coleman took the parody at face value. (This had happened before in England: Anthony Newley's brief career as a teen idol began after he had starred in a 1959 film satirizing a make-believe teen idol.) "A Star Is Born," read the headline of Coleman's article: and any irony was evi­dently unintended. "When a shooting star is heading for the peak," Coleman remarked, "there is usually one concert at which it's possi­ble to declare, 'That's it—he made it.' For David Bowie, opportunity knocked loud and clear last Saturday at London's Royal Festival Hall—and he left the stage a true 1972-style pop giant, clutching flowers from a girl who ran up and hugged and kissed him while a throng of fans milled around the stage."

Consecrated by the rock press, Bowie watched sales of his record­ings soar in England. Riding a wave of publicity not unlike that heralding the Beatles a decade earlier, he and his handlers set their eyes on the vast American market, their determination to conquer it fortified by a lavish line of credit extended by Bowie's American record label, RCA.

The Ziggy revue landed in America in the fall of 1972. The toast of trend-setters in L.A. and New York City—the sorts of places where influential people actually read British press clips—the show elsewhere was greeted with skepticism and, in many parts of the country, sheer indifference. In the United States, despite massive pub­licity, Bowie's recordings sold only modestly well—an early indica­tion that the global youth culture created by the Beatles, and ratified at the Monterey Pop Festival, was already beginning to fall apart, fragmenting into different youth subcultures defined by different styles of revolt, and different varieties of rock and roll.

Meanwhile, back in England, where misleading press releases recorded Bowie's overseas progress and helped reinforce the percep­tion that he was a global superstar, popular fascination with Ziggy continued to grow, becoming ecstatic after Bowie's triumphal return to touring in England in the spring of 1973.

One British fan, the writer Harvey Molloy, eleven at the time, later described in the most vivid of terms just what it felt like to be young, excited, and in the presence of Ziggy Stardust in these months. He recalls entering an amphitheater in Manchester that was crammed with kids done up in the regalia of their idol, wearing blue eye shadow, black crushed velvet clothing, and with small star-shaped se­quins glued onto their foreheads and cheeks. Molloy, like most of Ziggy's other converts, had committed to memory each song's lyrics, and had, for weeks, looked forward to participating in the liturgy of the event.

"He sings," recalls Molloy of the show's first minutes, "and the world becomes a catalogue of lost objects," doomed to disappear in five years, in the gospel according to Ziggy. "What pleasure comes from imagining the end not only of ourselves but of the entire world! . . . What would the end be like? Would it be final or would some people survive to live without cities, schools, laws and con­straints?"

When the Spiders From Mars launch into a prolonged instrumen­tal riff, Molloy feels his mind begin to wander: "I am teleported out­side of my mundane life into a vibrant, electric world," simultaneously isolated and fused with everyone else, "neither in the audience nor apart from it, neither separate from my body nor aware of it."

His epiphany is consummated when Ziggy sings the grand finale, "Rock 'n' Roll Suicide," and reaches out to the crowd, as if to heal the sick and raise the dead. "I feel like I'm watching Jesus," recalls Molloy. "He leans over the crowd at the end of the stage, his out­stretched hands taunting the front row audience who would give anything to touch him. Sublime, unattainable, out of reach. I know that I will never speak to him; I know that he will never witness the trivial fact of my existence; no Eucharist can allow the congregation to touch the savior."

A figure of serene self-absorption, the ersatz prophet on stage gazes at the undulating, outstretched arms of the crowd as if staring into a mirror. He is alone. So are they. It's just a charade, a make-believe outpouring of divine love.

In the midst of the hoopla, on his way back to England in 1973, David Bowie granted a characteristically disarming interview in which he dissociated himself from his own most famous creation in comments of startling honesty.

"You know," he said to a writer from Melody Maker, "the rock revolution did happen. It really did"—society really had been changed, personal revelations really had been provoked by the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

The irony, as Bowie explained, was that often no journalist was there to report what was happening, "so nobody knew when it hap­pened." (Dylan had put it this way: "It was like a flying saucer landed," he remarked in 1985. "That's what the sixties were like. Everybody heard about it, but only a few really saw it.")

Bowie himself had experienced the rock revolution: he was its product. And no matter what his younger fans might feel, Bowie knew that the Ziggy revue was, in this sense, unreal: it was mum­mery, a simulacrum, a theatrical conceit.

"This decadence thing is just a bloody joke," said Bowie to the re­porter. "I'm very normal . . . I am me, and I have to carry on with what I started. ... I never believed a hype could be made of an artist before the artist had got anywhere.

"That's what happened you see. But when I saw our albums were really selling"—as by the time of the interview they were, at least in England—"I knew that one period was over. Well, it wasn't—but at least we'd done something to be hyped about."

Indeed. With David Bowie, hype had become a legitimate, even celebrated aspect of rock and roll as a mode of cultural production. From now on, only someone (like Bowie, like Dylan) who knew bet­ter from firsthand experience would be able to separate the genuine from the spurious in what would still be marketed, even in the 1990s, as an ongoing rock "revolution."

But there was one final irony about the David Bowie phenome­non. He had colluded in creating a false impression of himself and the import of his cultural moment. But Ziggy Stardust had real, if transient effects: not least on those young British fans (like Harvey Molloy) who, before Bowie retired Ziggy at a "farewell" concert in July 1973, gave themselves heart and soul to the fake messiah with the flame red hair and the ghostly black face—an all-too-accurate emblem of rock and roll, and what it had become.

Early Seventies Rock & Roll

It had begun with a rare surge of spontaneous enthusiasm for a new performer, shared among a handful of club-goers on the East Coast. By the spring of 1974, the euphoria had spread to a small but influential group of rock critics, wired into the infrastruc­ture of media outlets that had sprung up, after the Summer of Love, to report on happenings in America's hip youth culture. And finally, one and a half years later, in the fall of 1975, the cause of the com­motion became a focus of national attention.

In the eyes of some, it was very glad news: a savior had appeared. His name was Bruce Springsteen. And he was going to be America's greatest pop music hero since Elvis Presley, never mind the Beatles.

Almost every aspect of the Springsteen phenomenon was remark­able. The unrestrained enthusiasm of a small coterie of admirers be­came the basis for a calculated outpouring of exaggerated praise that, in intelligence and sustained intensity, made the coverage of Ziggy Stardust seem amateurish by comparison. The performer himself, aware of the mounting hubbub, had spent endless hours in the studio, trying to craft a transcendent musical masterpiece. Executives at the performer's record label, Columbia, invested tens of thousands of dol­lars in a marketing campaign of unprecedented sophistication. Critics chimed in with rave reviews. And by the fall of 1975, with his album in stores and the star on his first national tour, Springsteen was being widely hailed as a rock and roll Messiah: not a pretend one, like Ziggy Stardust, but a real one—a figure blessed with the miraculous ability to lift up people's spirits (and drive their blues away).

That was when the mass media took over. By the end of October, Time and Newsweek, magazines read by millions of Americans, had both run major pieces—in the same week!—examining the Spring­steen phenomenon.

Never before in the history of rock and roll had a single performer been featured simultaneously on the cover of America's two major news magazines. Never before had concerted public proclamations about the significance of a rock and roll performer played such a central role in creating the impression that he was, in fact, signifi­cant. Never before had there been such obvious reason to wonder whether the proclamations were actually true.

Springsteen, twenty-six, had been playing in rock bands since the Sixties. Signed to Columbia in 1972 by John Hammond, he had quickly recorded two albums, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., re­leased in January 1973, and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle, released nine months later. Neither album sold many copies. Critics in the United States, writing in newly influential pop music publications like Rolling Stone (the mass-circulation biweekly founded in 1967), nevertheless expressed guarded admiration for both discs, especially the second, a roller-coaster ride through a vari­ety of riffs more or less familiar to anyone steeped in the rock and roll of the Sixties, but elaborated in long, breathless songs about an urban frontier peopled with romantic tramps and outlaws, each one with his or her own mock-heroic stage name: Rosalita, Big Balls Billy, Kitty, Weak-kneed Willie.

In the winter of 1974, Springsteen barnstormed up and down the East Coast. What on record had seemed overwrought on stage be­came overwhelming. The reason had only partly to do with the qual­ity of the music. Springsteen was a rudimentary guitarist, and his baritone was a raspy instrument. His band, too, though tightly re­hearsed, was little more than a glorified bar band, which was not surprising, since Springsteen had recruited its five members (bassist, drummer, organist, pianist, and saxophonist) from bands playing in various New Jersey bars. But if the music was sometimes rough-hewn, and if the band (especially compared to British rivals) was so casually outfitted as to make almost no visual impression at all, Springsteen himself projected a strong aura of blue-collar authentic­ity, and the band's gritty performances were rarely less than exhaust­ing. Fiercely committed to putting on a memorable show, he and the band made a practice of playing marathon sets that routinely lasted over two hours, until he, or his audience, or both, seemed on the verge of collapse. That was what, finally, provoked wonderment and joy: the sheer do-or-die spirit with which Springsteen played his mu­sic, night after night, week after week.

"Rock and roll came to my house where there seemed to be no way out," he said to one reporter in these years, explaining his own sense of having been "saved" by rock and roll. "And it came into my house—snuck in, ya know, and opened up a whole world of possibil­ities. Rock and roll. The Beatles opened doors. Ideally, if any stuff I do could ever do that for somebody, that's the best. Can't do any­thing better than that. Rock and roll motivates. It's the big, gigantic motivator, at least it was for me. There's a whole lot of things in­volved, but that's what I think you gotta remain true to. That idea, that feeling. That's the real spirit of the music"—and it was that spirit that came across in his performances in these months.

In April 1974, prompted by the buzz on the streets, two young writers—Dave Marsh, then the music editor of a Boston alternative weekly, The Real Paper, and Jon Landau, a columnist for The Real Paper, and also, as music editor of Rolling Stone, perhaps the most influential rock critic in America—went to check out a Springsteen show in a Boston-area bar. "Both of us had seen a lot of music per­formed in a lot of bars," Marsh later wrote, "but never with an ef­fect like that." In the first of his two books on Springsteen, Born to Run—a surprise best-seller in the United States—Marsh described his reaction in frankly religious terms. "The advent of Bruce Spring­steen," he wrote, "seemed nothing short of a miracle to me."

And so it seemed as well to Jon Landau: "On a night when I needed to feel young," he wrote a month later, "he made me feel like I was hearing music for the first time."

Landau was one of several writers who had risen to prominence in the Sixties by analyzing the significance of rock and roll. Unlike most of his peers, he knew how to play an instrument, the guitar, and (at the invitation of Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, who doubtless saw in Landau a younger version of himself) had gotten involved in producing records, working among others with the MC5, a quintet of self-avowed rock and roll revolutionaries. Appreciating though he did the broader cultural ramifications of the music, Landau was far more in­terested in how essentially unschooled performers could flourish as showmen expert in the enigmatic art of thrilling large audiences with feats of musical magic. College-educated and bookish, he was fasci­nated by musicians who were neither. Otis Redding, for example, he praised for being "openly and honestly concerned with pleasing crowds," and also for being "truly a 'folk' artist," unwilling to modu­late his music according to passing trends. In an essay published in 1968, he expressed his distaste for the Dionysian posturing of the Doors, and wondered out loud why "it wasn't good enough just to sing about cars, balling, dances, school and summertime blues."

It's small wonder, then, that Bruce Springsteen struck a chord with Landau. He did after all just sing about cars, balling, dances, school, and summertime blues. The world that Springsteen evoked was not, finally, all that different from the one depicted in American Graffiti. Even better, Springsteen seemed like the real thing—he was a paragon of populist musical virtues, evidently as untainted and pure in his own way as Robert Johnson or Otis Redding, despite growing up within earshot of Alan Freed's radio show.

"He has far more depth than most artists," Landau explained to Newsweek in 1975, "because he really has roots in a place—coastal Jersey, where no record company scouts ever visit." (It was true that John Hammond had not had to leave Midtown Manhattan in order to discover Springsteen—but that was because the singer had come to him.)

In May 1974, after seeing Springsteen live for the second time, Landau—knowing that his words carried uncommon weight within the American music business—wrote an impassioned essay, declaring "I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen."

Though written for a local Boston weekly, Landau's sentiments were soon enough blazoned in advertisements, paid for by Spring-steen's record company. Landau's imprimatur had three immediate effects. The first was to set Springsteen himself a daunting, and perhaps impossible task—to fulfill Landau's prophecy. The second was to force every self-respecting rock critic in America to sit up and take notice. Last but not least, Landau's emphatic words of praise con­vinced Springsteen's record label to embark on an intensive, and ex­pensive, new effort to market his first two albums.

These were months in which it was clear, certainly to Jon Landau and his peers in the critical community, that the explosive growth of rock and roll had produced paradoxical consequences. More people than ever before were listening to the music—on radio, on television, on film, and not least on recordings, which were selling in larger quantities than ever. But the more pervasive rock and roll became, the less it seemed to matter.

The key problem was simple. As the appetite of younger listeners for rock music had continued to grow, the companies and media out­lets competing to satisfy their appetite had begun to specialize, offer­ing different kinds of rock to different target audiences, splitting apart a market that had been unified as recently as 1967, when the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper. In the mid-Sixties, radio stations around the world, when they played rock and roll, had generally played more or less the same handful of songs, insuring that the music, when it became popular, reached a large and diverse cohort of listen­ers. A decade later, the situation was entirely different. In America, rock was easy to hear—indeed, it had all but driven most other forms of music off the radio—but stations rarely played the same songs. Some, sticking with Top 40, played only current hits. Others specialized in oldies but goodies, sometimes concentrating on music from the Fifties, sometimes on music from the Sixties. Some played only "urban" or primarily black artists, while still other stations played only "progressive" artists like David Bowie and Led Zep­pelin, acts that sold large numbers of long-playing albums without having a number one single on the Top 40. (By the Nineties, the rise of alternative rock would leave the market even more fragmented.)

In this situation, no one could any longer reasonably expect one radio station to air all the rock music that was worth hearing, just as no one of sound mind would actually wish to hear all the rock and roll records that were now being released. A rock act of real cultural consequence in one country—David Bowie in England, for exam­ple—might well become moderately popular in another country, but without having any cultural consequence there at all (such was Bowie's fate in America).

For anyone weaned, like Jon Landau, on the sentiments of shared self-discovery unleashed first by Elvis Presley and then by the Beatles, the new regime was hopelessly frustrating. Motivating his personal quest for "The Next Big Thing" was an inchoate but powerful yearn­ing—for a new rock hero as real and mythic (and as popular) as Elvis and the Beatles. It was precisely this need that Bruce Springsteen seemed to meet. Even better, he seemed to meet it instinctively, spon­taneously, without coaching or self-conscious theatricality (unlike Bowie), and also without (as the press duly noted) the use of illegal drugs. He seemed, in short, a throwback to rock's golden age of in­nocence.

Once Columbia had renewed its publicity campaign for Spring­steen in earnest, over the summer of 1974, the singer was in a strange sort of box. Asked to deliver the "future" of rock and roll, he was also now widely expected to function as if he were a " 'folk' artist" (to use Landau's rubric), by using inspiration and intuition to create a fresh new music as ostensibly uncontrived and primordial as that widely believed to have been produced by the first heroes of rock and roll.

Trying to rise to the challenge, Springsteen wrote a new song, "Born to Run," which would become the title track of his next al­bum. Composed like an old-fashioned teen anthem from the early Sixties, Springsteen and his band spent weeks working up an elabo­rate arrangement in the studio, using multiple overdubs to create a cavernous, majestic, quasi-orchestral sound without actually using an orchestra (though Springsteen had played with that idea, too, cut­ting an early, rejected version of the song with strings).

Given an advance tape of "Born to Run" by Springsteen, Landau shared it with writers he trusted to be helpful. But as the pressure mounted to produce nothing less than a masterpiece, and his own self-confidence began to falter, Springsteen anxiously reached out for some­one who could offer him expert musical advice, the kind of advice that George Martin had given the Beatles. (Up till then, Springsteen had produced his own music in conjunction with his manager, a burly ex-Marine of limited musical talents named Mike Appel.)

The person that Springsteen turned to was Jon Landau—who, having foreseen the future, was now asked to help make his predic­tion come true.

As 1974 turned into 1975, Springsteen and his band, working with Landau, concentrated on the task at hand. Exploiting the singer's natural aura of artless honesty, Landau implicitly cast his leading man as a new kind of star-spangled superhero, doing with a rock star what filmmaker John Ford had done with John Wayne: taking a minor artist and turning him into a major symbol, a larger-than-life personification of America, Land of the Free.

By the start of summer 1975, the songs for the next album were written, and the recording was largely finished. Executives at Colum­bia loved what they heard, and decided to invest still more money in promoting Springsteen. "You don't go right to the public to sell a new performer," remarked Bruce Lundvall, the man in charge of Co­lumbia's marketing efforts, speaking to a reporter from Business Week: "You sell him to your own company first, then to the trade, then to the record buyers."

At the end of August, on the eve of the album's release, Spring­steen and his band were booked into the Bottom Line, a 400-seat nightclub in Greenwich Village that functioned at the time as an in­dustry showcase for new talent. Columbia filled the house night after night with record label staffers, and also made certain that elite tastemakers were on hand to witness the event. Springsteen's appear­ances also drew long lines of ordinary fans, frantic to obtain one of the artificially scarce tickets, reinforcing the impression that his­tory—real history—was being made. (The atmosphere was not un­like that generated three years earlier when David Bowie had debuted Ziggy Stardust in London at the Royal Festival Hall.)

Since one of the Bottom Line shows was recorded for broadcast, and subsequently circulated widely as an unauthorized album, it is possible to verify some of what was happening musically, and take some measure of the bizarre disproportion between the mood of frenzied excitement communicated by the press coverage and the modest but real charm of the performance at issue.

As Dave Marsh described one show, accurately enough, "the songs invariably build from a whisper to a scream"—subtlety was not one of Springsteen's gifts. Drawing material from all three of his albums, the singer turned several of his songs into epic sagas. One of them, "Kitty's Back," routinely lasted more than eighteen minutes. The music, as it survives on the broadcast recording, is notable for its nervous, unrelenting drive—and also for its unblushing exploitation of crude musical devices, such as the wildly rushing tempo used to climax the song "Rosalita."

These devices were amplified on stage by a host of stunts that dated back to the era of vaudeville and blackface. At the end of one show, described by John Rockwell, a New York Times rock critic as­signed to profile Springsteen for Rolling Stone, Springsteen feigned fainting into the arms of his most important stage foil, Clarence demons. A pawn in what had become a quintessential rock and roll mise-en-scene, Clemons was Springsteen's designated "Superspade" (to borrow the charged term used by Robert Christgau in his critique of the Monterey Pop Festival). A modestly talented saxophonist, Clemons had one priceless asset: he was a big, burly black man who was quite willing to clown around for black folk, just like Louis Jor­dan or Louis Armstrong.

"I don't think I can go on, Clarence," Springsteen croaked at this point in the show. "It's cholesterol on my heart. My doctor told me if I sing this song once more, he wouldn't be responsible. But I gotta do it, Clarence, I gotta." With that, Springsteen hurled himself into the last chorus of "Twist and Shout"—the very same ersatz gospel song that the Beatles had used a decade earlier to bring down the house.

It was a gesture of breathtaking bravado, and, in the view of Rockwell, it epitomized Springsteen's genius: "It was pure corn, of course, but a perfect instance of the way Springsteen can launch into a bit of theatricalized melodrama, couch it in affectionate parody, and wind up heightening his own overwhelmingly personal rock & roll impact." (The reader was left to wonder what, precisely, distin­guished a "rock & roll impact" from any other sort.)

The furor over Born to Run was an eye-opening experience. For the first time, the key players—music critics, record executives, publi­cists, disc jockeys, editors in the mainstream media—gained an ap­preciation for the marvelous circularity of the process of rock star-making as it had evolved: if it was declared loudly enough that a musician had wider cultural significance, it was feasible to manufac­ture, however briefly, at least a simulacrum of wider cultural signifi­cance, insofar as this could be measured by the attention paid to a performer by the mass media. "Is it all publicity?" asked Bruce Lundvall at the time. "Some of it is, sure. But Springsteen has to be good enough to sell records over the long haul."

As the passage of time would show, Bruce Springsteen was in fact good enough "to sell records over the long haul." Indeed, in 1984, his seventh album, Born in the U.S.A., became the object of an even more intensive marketing blitz that, before it was finished, com­pletely overshadowed what Columbia had done with Born to Run, and turned it into one of the top-selling records of all time, with over fifteen million copies sold worldwide.

Yet Springsteen's triumph was in some ways Pyrrhic, since it had some perverse and presumably unintended consequences. Like David Bowie as Ziggy Star dust, Bruce Springsteen as "Bruce Springsteen, American Superhero" was widely perceived as a quasi-religious, larger-than-life medium of spiritual uplift. Both Bowie and Spring­steen nurtured this impression by shrewdly manipulating the whole range of mass media that had grown up around rock and roll since the Beatles. But by shrewdly manipulating the media, both artists— Bowie did this deliberately—turned the public image of themselves, and their music, into fetishized commodities, prefab tokens of a rap­turous transcendence, producing a variety of goods that could be purchased and (for the truly idolatrous) reverently collected. With the successful mass-marketing in the United States of Bruce Spring­steen, American Superhero (the very image of redemptive innocence), following on the heels of the successful mass-marketing in England of Ziggy Stardust (the very image of redemptive self-destruction), the age of innocence in rock was well and truly over—probably forever.

In 1997, music historian Fred Goodman justly summed up the larger meaning of the Springsteen phenomenon. "His ultimate em­brace of music as business made it impossible to separate the acts of faith from the acts of fortune or to tell which one was pursued in the service of the other. As a business strategy it was superb. . . . But as an action, its meaning was completely different from that of the protest movement, to which it owed so much of its persona."

Fiercely committed though his stage performances showed him to be, Bruce Springsteen in 1975 didn't challenge the supremacy of crass commercialism in the music business. He unwittingly consum­mated it—and so revealed, just as Jon Landau had promised that he would, "rock and roll future."

-end