Ways To Be Unwicked

Fantastic dialogue in this thread about roots-rock and its discontents (a few of my thoughts here appeared hastily there). What sticks with me – especially now, poised at decade’s end – is the implicit determination of the rockcrit establishment incarnated by Rolling Stone to promote a series of ideas about how music is supposed to work. Since minor bands, even good ones, are empty vessels waiting to be filled, they allowed themselves to become flagbearers for these ideas, and why not? Bands want promotion. So if your name is Jason, and you lead a group of Nashville guitarslingers called the Scorchers that sound like Hank Williams played at punk speed, you’ll let RS interview you for its roots-rock story, maybe even submit to a photograph with The Blasters, Charlie Sexton, and Lone Justice. If you’re a bizzer like John Hiatt, you make the switch from journeyman to fellow traveler faster than you switched record labels. Whatever works. If promoting authenticity is your métier, then any Yankee will do.

(X were in a curious position. They weren’t punk enough to disgust producer Ray Manzarek; Billy Zoom’s quiff and concise riffage suggested some amalgamation of pre-Beatles signifiers; and they wrote a song called “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” in which they lamented the domination of British acts on commercial radio over bands like, well, X. But there’s enough unease in Exene and John Doe’s voices to suggest that they weren’t being xenophobic, just tired of being four albums into a career with no hint of multiplatinum or “Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?”).

Because that was the problem: listening to the first Lone Justice album now (apparently it was a big deal in college radio and rockcrit circles in 1985) and watching the band’s videos, the pomp and eyeliner against which these earnest kids were reacting is all there anyway: earrings, synthesizers, and walloping drums that may or may not be programmed, so loud that no wonder Maria McKee shouted so much; she’s like Aretha duetting with a jack hammer. But it’s American excess, not British – why did we need British fags with synths and drum machines when we can promote our own?

This Big Country review, published at the height of the so-called Second British Invasion, was the opening salvo in the American reaction to Eurythmics, Human League, Culture Club, and other synth-fag acts. Kurt Loder’s byline  (his other reviews from this period aren’t quite this cranky) matters less than that the magazine in which it got published ran a cover story with Boy George on its cover within a few weeks. Yay capitalism. Anyway:

Here’s a big-noise guitar band from Britain that blows the knobs off all the synth-pop diddlers and fake-funk frauds who are cluttering up the charts these days.

Less than two years later, Parke Puterbaugh in the same magazine praised the much-hyped Lone Justice on similar terms:

If you want to hear great original music without having to buy cheap foreign imports, there’s just one place to go: West, young man. Lone Justice is the latest major-label contender on the growing list of left-coast bands who possess a panoramic vision and a thoroughgoing passion for American roots music.

Look to the language, as Orwell once wrote. Adopting lingo that Don Draper and his crew would recognize, two different writers don’t analyze these records so much as sell them. And the music community colluded. However you define roots-rock, I’m not sure if said definition is catholic enough to include  songwriting and production assists from the Tom Petty axis and Little Steven Van Zandt, whose participation should tell you something about the politics: the decade’s cadre of multiplatinum geezers and geezers-to-be wanted to take back the night from those limey fruits; they wanted a return to 1981, when AOR ruled the earth. Roots-rock had to sound like Tom Petty and Springsteen records. And how about that big-voiced blonde! She’s purtier than Tom Bailey!

As I wrote in the I Love Music thread, those blinkered Mondale voters didn’t understand that they’d made their endorsement of these bands contingent upon Reaganism ascendant. 1985, a few hours into Morning in America, found Reagan at or near the peak of his popularity, a misunderstood Springsteen on his round of stadium tours*, and the American Top 40 in the doldrums (the British one was not much better). With facts like this it’s no wonder that Puterbaugh and others sensed the time was right to act as if “Born in the U.S.A.” was the nationalistic anthem of George F. Will’s dreams. Hell, Lone Justice’s “Ways To Be Wicked” video could have been a documentary record of a bar band warming up the crowd at the Republican convention the previous year; it”s so proud of its straight lines, of its lack of color, of a band determined to flaunt its unwickedness.

* In early 1986, with Reagan still triumphant after the bombing of Muammar al-Gaddafi’s home in retaliation for a fatal bomb explosion in a German disco, Springsteen released “My Hometown,”  his seventh and final top ten from Born in the U.S.A. That this doom-laden ballad, almost choking on its own despair, charted so high pointed either to a collective cognitive dissonance or an audience that knew exactly what it was doing.