The Dark Side of the Moon

Times of crisis always call into question the role of art in society, and its efficacy in representing in a meaningful way the struggles of bodies of people in different places and times. America in 2012 faces a crisis; material resources are scarce, and the younger generation faces a certain kind of extinction if it cannot attach itself to older, materially established generations. In the corpus of rock music which has been produced, what speaks to this kind of crisis? Pink Floyd's 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon is interesting not only because it does speak to this crisis, but because it speaks back, in a nuanced way, to every form of human crisis. Roger Waters' lyrical approach is unique- never before or since has a rock lyricist so directly engaged the big themes which preoccupy humanity. Songs like "Time," "Money," and "Us and Them" do not, as Ray Davies or Bruce Springsteen would, use characters we are meant to identify with to make their points; rather, they assume our complicity in a kind of discussion, speaking to us by identifying with our concerns- an implied first person ("I") speaking to a second or third-person plural. Waters appears to wish to speak more broadly than Davies or Springsteen do. Of the three songs mentioned, "Us and Them" is the sharpest in taking a human essence and transmitting it. More than most great rock songs, it's the story of all of our lives, specifically because no one rises above being grouped (one way or another) against other people, unfairly and arbitrarily.

"Us and Them" is a series of vignettes illustrating this principle- a front-rank of soldiers die, while generals sit comfortably plotting their armies' next moves (and for whom the dying soldiers are just lines on a map); governments configure themselves while populations die hopelessly beneath them; suffering people ignore each other on the street and expire alone. "Us and Them" begins with the premise of war and moves out in these directions- soldiers are "ordinary men" who would not choose (necessarily) to fight. Ray Davies' "Some Mother's Son," from Arthur, begins from a similar premise but doesn't broaden out. What's most relevant about "Us and Them" in 2012 is that it does broaden out, because "Us and Them" situations in America are so relevant, as the gulf widens past the point of no return between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots, the young and the aged. In debilitating times, it stands to reason that rock fans would want to hear serious rock music which expresses material realities spiritually and directly. Musically, Dark Side of the Moon forms a hinge between the lyrical gravitas of Roger Waters and the agile, graceful musicality of Rick Wright, with David Gilmour "playing both sides," providing a voice. Later albums, like Waters' magnum opus The Wall, degenerated into musical vulgarity without Wright's influence; likewise, the period in Pink Floyd's development dominated by Wright (Ummagumma, Meddle, etc) suffered from a lack of lyrical gravitas. Unlike the albums which preceded it, Dark Side is a collection of concise pop songs, and Pink Floyd went out of their way to make the album cohesive.

The basic gist is this- here, arrayed, are the forces which could drive a human being to the brink of madness- Time, Money, etc. The snatches of conversation woven into the album feature people discussing their bouts with madness (or, in what could be taken as a colloquialism, the dark side of the moon)- sound collages like "On the Run" take this a step further, exteriorizing the sound of dementia. Briefly, Pink Floyd found a way to mix musical and lyrical avant-gardism- the result was a phenomenal commercial success. If Dark Side is more relevant than the Wall in 2012, it's because the musical dimension of Dark Side is palliative. It also needs to be said that what "Us and Them" accomplishes lyrically is the same thing The Wall accomplishes in its entirety, and with Wright and Gilmour's musicality working for it. Dark Side even goes so far (uniquely, in the Floyd canon) as to employ saxophones, which add an edge of the urban, and widened the appeal of the album. It's a complete package. It also, to discerning minds, made punk bands like the Clash (who had similar lyrical intentions) look instantly immature. If the punks liked to claim that Pink Floyd were boring, the Floyd could rightfully answer back that the punks were spiritual and musical children. Pink Floyd were never rabble-rousers- their music was (and is) for adults. Because few "haute" artists in the late twentieth century were addressing the big themes, once again rock music produced something which trumped haute culture. Pink Floyd were ambitious and serious enough to blur the lines between high and low culture- Dark Side is a site where this "blur" is successfully negotiated. What people want from artists in times of crisis is a gloss on the big themes- in the rock canon, no album accomplishes this with more authority than Dark Side of the Moon.

Achtung, Baby: Sexualizing the 90s

The Nineties had its own version of Sixties counterculture- it was called the Alternative Revolution. The Alternative Revolution was more limited in scope than Sixties counterculture was- not only were the numbers not there for those who were young adults in the Nineties (rather than the number deluge for the Baby Boomer generation), popular culture was splintered in a way that it wasn't splintered in the Sixties. During that era, the Beatles covered Smokey Robinson and Chuck Berry, and Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett covered the Beatles and the Stones. In the Nineties, with minor exceptions, black and white popular musicians remained segregated. Likewise the British rock musicians who comprised the "Brit-Pop" movement remained wary about Americans, so that, for the entirety of the Nineties, a wide gulf separated America and England. Still, the Alternative Revolution was widespread, and represented a rejection of the corporate ethos which had dominated American popular culture in the Eighties. The Nineties version of the Love-Ins, Be-Ins, and Woodstocks of the Sixties was Lollapalooza, a traveling festival which toured America in the early-to-mid Nineties. It was a fusion of rock and other forms of popular music with revolutionary, liberal politics, and, even though entrance was paid, a huge smash among young Americans.

The place of sexuality in the Nineties and the Alternative Revolution is conflicted- many Alternative figureheads were coy about sexuality, and this generation of rock musicians (born in the Sixties) had no Mick Jagger. If kids were looking for a figurehead to channel their psycho-sexual energies, they would have to look somewhere else. The place of U2 in the Alternative Revolution was strange and strained- they consolidated their position as a major rock band in the empty Eighties, playing expansive, earnest, conservative mainstream rock. They wrote about politics and love without being overtly sexual; part of their appeal to the mainstream was that (unusually) they advertised themselves as practicing Christians. Because they ran out of steam at the end of the Eighties, and because winds of change were in the air around "indie" rock like R.E.M. going mainstream (indie into mainstream being one of the most well-worn paths of the Alternative Revolution), U2 holed up and decided to redo their image and everything else about them. In a miracle of timing, when U2 emerged with Achtung, Baby in the fall of '91, it was coterminous with the release of Nirvana's Nevermind, the album which publicly announced the emergence of the Alternative Revolution to the world. Kurt Cobain's Nevermind songs, especially the four singles ("Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Come as You Are," "In Bloom," "Lithium") rebelled against overt expressions of sexual desire. They focused instead on channeling the psycho-affective energies of America's adolescents. In many ways, Cobain was an anti-Jagger; sexual desires were not only not exteriorized but were stigmatized as well.

Tellingly, the only song on Nevermind about sex, "Polly," was about destruction and deviance- the song narrates from inside the head of a rapist (shades of Jagger's "Midnight Rambler"). What Achtung, Baby offered rock fans was the exact opposite- a fully sexualized, sexually self-aware version of U2. What separates Bono's lyrics from Mick Jagger's is that they're also about blood-and-guts, in-the-trenches intimacy- a resolutely adult world where sex carries with it emotions other than lust, egotistical pride, and envy. Bono, at the time, went out of his way to bludgeon his image into shape with his lyrics- gone were the Everyman uniforms, in were black leather pants a la Jim Morrison, Ray-Ban shades a la Lou Reed (one of his main lyrical avatars at the time), and the self-conscious, anti-piety haughtiness of the major league rock star. Did this work? Because Bono was already set in place as a rock star, and because Achtung, Baby was an immediate success, it did, even if the persona Bono created ("The Fly") was more like a David Bowie character than something Bono wanted to establish as permanent. Interestingly (and, for those who know post-modern art, oddly), U2's foray into fully-blown, mature sexuality coincided with a heavy flirtation with the ethos of post-modernity- irony, the embrace of surfaces and images, pop culture for its own sake, etc. The Zoo TV tour which followed Achtung, Baby was a post-modern spectacle- what Bono forced into place on the tour was an idea Andy Warhol might've approved of: post-modern sexuality.

In a way (and probably without knowing it), what Bono was doing was much more interesting than the post-modern art which had achieved success in the "haute" art world- Bruce Nauman, Jeff Koons, etc. Koons, particularly, got trumped by Bono's inclusion of emotion in his explorations of sexuality. Bono's protagonists in songs like "One" were well-rounded. Bono's achievement was also more interesting than those of someone like David Byrne, whose non sequiter ethos too often dissolved into cuteness and smarm. Byrne, also, was not good at incorporating emotions into his songs. The place of Bono and U2 in the Alternative Revolution was ambiguous- they weren't outcasts (which they probably would've been had they stayed in Joshua Tree mode), they weren't necessarily embraced either. The Achtung, Baby songs got played on Alternative Rock radio stations alongside Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, and the rest; the Zoo TV tour filled stadiums. They outsold the Alternative Rock bands, sometimes outrageously. In retrospect, what U2 had to offer was something the Alternative generation rejected; maturity and intimacy (albeit wrapped in a post-modern package). It constitues, in rock history, a kind of stand-off. In an era of stand-offs, U2 versus the Alternative Revolution was a major one. Happily, a big chunk of rock fans chose to embrace both.

Interiors: Sister Lovers and the 70s

One facet of the rock master narrative that's never changed is this: in the early 1970s, a group of singer-songwriters came to prominence (James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Leonard Cohen, Jackson Browne) who conflated introspective tendencies with the desire to "confess" in their lyrics. Interestingly, this confessional trend mirrored something which had happened in English-language poetry ten years prior- New England poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman had made successful a highly stylized version of extreme Romanticism- first-person narratives which brought to light personal tragedies and vulnerabilities in an unmediated way. In the translation from "haute" to popular culture, the bathos of Lowell became the bathos of James Taylor- a song like "Fire and Rain," his break-out hit, dramatized his personal struggle with accepting mortality after the death of one of his friends. The music was not the folk-rock of the Byrds but folk-pop: pleasant, major-key, and easy to listen to or ignore. One of the features of early-Seventies singer-songwriters was a dichotomy between melancholy lyrics and dulcet music- the sense that sugar-coating could sell bathetic confessionalism. Jackson Browne was the most extreme (and sharpest) of these singer-songwriters, whose perceptively probing lyrics could be devastating, but whose music was as sunny "California" as it could be. "Doctor My Eyes," his hit from '72, is a bizarre mixture of breeziness and the macabre; the dichotomous split between lyrics and music is almost laughable.

The main idea of the singer-songwriters (this is a part of the rock master narrative which makes sense) was to move inwards, towards a state of self-absorption, rather than extending the communal, countercultural impulses of the Sixties. The basic gist seemed to be that the communal had failed- but the shattered dreams of individuals were still worth exploring. If Sixties sociability became Seventies self-absorption, what rock audiences wanted was to have their concerns (personal relationships and vulnerabilities) mirrored. The problem is that in 2012, albums like Carole King's Tapestry (a monster commercial success at the time) and Joni Mitchell's Blue (a monster critical success over the last forty years) now sound tepid and self-indulgent, wrapped up in their own platitudes. A better, sharper, more imaginative version of Seventies self-absorption was Big Star's Third/ Sister Lovers, recorded in Memphis in the mid-Seventies but not released until '78. If the album has a centerpiece, it's "Holocaust," which is both musically and lyrically extreme in a manner that the more mainstream singer-songwriters never were. Sister Lovers does have an interesting sense of musical avant-gardism working in its favor- the way it was produced (by Jim Dickinson), the music is structured unconventionally to include eerie "breakdowns" or "breakage," wherein songs drift into periods of inchoate discord or dark hushes. The extremity of Sister Lovers accounts for the fact that there is no dichotomous wall separating lyrics from music- both are strange and haunted.

What Alex Chilton, the avatar of Sister Lovers, confesses to is multiple- within the context of a love triangle, he confesses not merely to an inability to relate but an inability to transcend venomous self-loathing (which engenders perpetual self-abasement.) That's what "Holocaust" is, lyrically- an exercise in self-loathing. The best rock lyricists of the Sixties (Davies, Reed, Jagger, et al) were not big on self-abasement and self-hatred; nor, incidentally, were confessional poets like Plath, Sexton, Lowell, and Berryman. Even at the edge of the abyss, Plath mythologizes herself as "Lady Lazarus," a kind of reverse goddess. If Chilton cuts deeper than these poets, it's because he speaks out of a context he created on Sister Lovers (the love triangle with Dana and Lesa), rather than wallowing. This context, however strange Sister Lovers is, is dynamic; it places Chilton's self-abasement, self-hatred, and self-absorption within something. If you put Chilton's Seventies centerpiece against some Sixties centerpieces ("A Day in the Life," "2000 Light Years from Home"), what comes across is that the protagonist of "Holocaust" is not a space-cadet or an Everyman; he's someone so submerged in his interiority that it's difficult to sense how he appears on the surface. Sister Lovers is "music from the depths"- it's uncompromising in a way that the more commercially successful singer-songwriters were not willing to be.

Sister Lovers shares with Ray Davies a stance against engaging the topical- but (usually) from a first-person perspective. Because the songs are affixed to a plot which thickens and concludes (in some sequences), we sympathize with this protagonist, as we do with the narrators of many Davies songs. He has an interior and an exterior life. Where Lou Reed is concerned, the only thing which seems to be deviant about this character is his degree of self-loathing. The funny thing is to put Alex Chilton up next to the complacency of James Taylor or Cat Stevens. Complacency is one of the reasons critic Lester Bangs found James Taylor so annoying- however much he whined, he himself was never the problem, and what he confessed was tainted by this syndrome. The dichotomy of "shallow depths" disappears in Sister Lovers into a realm of genuine emotional torment. Public mythologies are prevalent around the making of this record- that Alex Chilton was non compos mentis on drugs most of the time, and that his relationship with Lesa Aldredge exacerbated this. Alex Chilton, in '74, was living out what James Taylor was faking. Considering what had happened to the Sixties stalwarts by '74 artistically (especially the Stones and Kinks), Chilton was by then the most relevant figure in rock music, even if no one knew it at the time. Bruce Springsteen's eruption the next year in some ways worked as an American renascence to the Ray Davies "manner"- but confessional rock reached its apotheosis in Sister Lovers. Between Chilton and Springsteen, America in the Seventies had produced two rock songwriters who upped the ante against countercultural conformity, clannishness, and elitism.

The Rolling Stones in 1969

The basic gist of the Stanley Booth book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones is that when the Rolling Stones toured America in 1969, it meant something. Booth is vague about what exactly it meant- but it was clear that by '69, the Stones represented a kind of dynamism which had a political edge for a large group of young Americans. Mick Jagger, in particular, was seen as a figurehead, channeling the psycho-sexual energies of his audience and giving them a direction. The Rolling Stones were a potent symbol of just that- psycho-sexual energies, loosened by generational conflict and aroused by new freedoms. But songs like "Street Fighting Man" and the then-current "Gimme Shelter" had made the Stones political, and with the Beatles and Dylan off the road or inactive (enough of a rock master narrative was already in place then to invest in Dylan oracular powers), young Americans looked to the Stones to help them blow off some steam. When fans and critics reminisce about the tour, they tend to linger on Altamont- the free concert at the tour's end at which several spectators were killed and about which a documentary was made by the Maysles brothers. Americans who castigate the Stones for procuring the Hell's Angels to provide security at Altamont tend not to know the back-story- that the English Hell's Angels successfully provided security at a free concert the Stones had given five months before in London.

The Stones' credulity as to the reliability of the American Hell's Angels is part of the story of those times- the "we are all one" rhetoric affeted them too, and two young musicians (Jagger and Richards both turned twenty-six in '69) had no disinclination to trust the San Francisco "heads" who assured them of the American Hell's Angels capabilities. If ever a band were not to be taken in, it was the Stones; but they were here. So that the violence of the Altamont concert in December '69 became a freighted symbol in the rock master narrative- here's where the Sixties dream ends, here's where we are no longer one. It, we are told, shot down the possibilities which Woodstock had opened four months before. If it all seems too neat and clean to see things this way, it's because too many Sixties "heads" saw through the ostensible Sixties dream even as it was unfolding- not just Jagger but Lennon, Morrison, Davies, and the rest. But the Stones in '69 were bellwhethers, and what happened to them in that year was indicative. Their founding member Brian Jones was found drowned in his swimming pool in July, having just been forced from the band a month earlier. The Stones turned their free concert in Hyde Park, London, into a memorial show, and Mick Jagger read a portion of Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy for John Keats, "Adonais," to the crowd.

There's very little Romantic which can be said of the person Brian Jones was- a rampant misogynist who fathered innumerable children, an alcoholic and a drug addict who was always eager to bite the various hands which fed him, and (eventually) a parasite on the group he created. Jones, unlike the other members of the band, was raised in a respectable environment- middle-class Cheltenham, to which he seldom returned once the Stones' adventures were underway. Jones' promiscuity was symptomatic of the times he lived in- by the end of his life, he was besotted. His death gave rock fans a taste of what was to come. By the time they landed in America, they had broken in a new member- blues-guitar wunderkind Mick Taylor. With his virtuosity in tow, they sounded better then they ever had before. Their mid-'69 single, "Honky Tonk Women," eschewed dealing with issues and encouraged their audience just to dance and enjoy the music. Their '69 album Let it Bleed was another kettle of fish- if less cohesive than Satanic Majesties, it's still a magnum opus. Undercurrents of violence are audible in "Gimme Shelter," "Midnight Rambler," and "You Can't Always Get What You Want." "Midnight Rambler" is particularly outre; the lyrics narrate from inside the mind of a serial killer in the act of rape and murder. America had been sensitized to this by Charles Manson and his henchmen; if Jagger touched a nerve (and "Midnight Rambler" was prominently featured in their '69 shows), it's because by '69 America had come to the realization that these were violent times.

The Stones looked especially relevant because the Beatles' '69 release, Abbey Road, was musically sharp but ("You Never Give Me Your Money" notwithstanding) lyrically weak- John Lennon chose to make his political statement with "Bed-Ins," undertaken with his spouse, conceptual artist Yoko Ono. In '69, Lennon was earnest (and ridiculous) where Jagger was darkly ironic (though the song "Gimme Shelter" was a direct statement and apparently made in earnest). How many of Jagger's fans noticed his ironies? "Live with Me," from Let it Bleed, riffs on Jagger's status as a nouveau aristocrat. In the English upper classes, the servants often wind up having a better time than the masters. That's the basic gist of the lyrics, and the Stones sound as taut and forceful here as they do anywhere else. "Monkey Man" is a riff in another direction- because of their musical roots, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were often accused not only of stealing from black musicians but of wanting to be black themselves. In the hip parlance of the day, they were perceived as "White Negroes." The irony here is that Jagger does have a sense of irony- blues lyrics usually don't. To make a long story short, Jagger noticed a wide gulf between how the Stones were perceived and who they actually were. The strange thing about Let in Bleed in '69 was that there were two love songs on it ("Love in Vain," "You Got the Silver") but, uncharacteristically for the Stones, no songs just about sex (as there had been on Aftermath, Beggar's Banquet, etc). Let it Bleed is hardly platonic, but it's about humanity and the full range of human emotions, rather than just the ins and outs of expressed sexuality. As such, it dwarfs Abbey Road and makes an interesting companion to the Kinks' Arthur, also released in '69. Arthur is a narrative song-cycle about a sympathetic English Everyman and his travails as he attempts to rise in society. As usual, Ray Davies makes no concessions to the topical and the counterculture, and focuses on the quotidian, and the processes of aging. Jagger's ironies reinforce that he's aging too, and simple expressions of lust no longer suffice. If Jagger, by '69, was "on the hook" as a public figure (which Ray Davies wasn't), he was also (along with Keith Richards) making sure the Stones' growth was present and accounted for. As no other band in rock history, the Rolling Stones took death and made it creative.

The '68 Renascence

The rock master narrative is full of myths. One of the myths is this: after the dominant rock songwriters and performers spent a year of deep and positive engagement with the counterculture in '67, in '68 they came back down earth and explored their musical roots again. The truth is much more complex- that many of the most authoritative responses to the counterculture in '67 were negative, and that what is seen as the '68 renascence actually constitutes not a disengagement but another means of exploration. All of the bands that have been previously dealt with (Beatles, Stones, Doors, Velvets, Kinks) released albums in '68. The only flat-out disappointment in the group, artistically, were the Doors. Waiting for the Sun, a hodge-podge of leftovers, studio compositions, and bubble-gum singles, was a retreat from the seriousness and cinematic moodiness of Strange Days that the Doors never completely recovered from. The Doors toured Europe for the first time in '68, but the tour was marred by Jim Morrison's problems with drugs and alcohol. Over on another side, Bob Dylan broke a two-year silence in '68 with the largely acoustic John Wesley Harding. Dylan's songs were loaded with allegories and Biblical imagery, but did not tackle any then-current issues head-on. Nor did any of the songs seem to imply a critique of the counterculture. The Band's Music from Big Pink was lauded into a position of influence by early rock critics that year- it's rustic, domestic charms occupy the position in the rock master narrative of showing rock, in '68, where it needed to go next. The songs' lyrical opacity dwelt on many of the themes Dylan's '68 lyrics dwelt on. But the way the music sounded, with all the members of the Band pitching in equally, made them an instant community-signifier, a musical metaphor for a political reality which many were trying to realize. Or so it was said.

Perhaps the biggest rock leap forward in '68 was the Rolling Stones' Beggar's Banquet. Of the key tracks, "Street Fighting Man" was the one which lingered on the theme of the counterculture and what could be done for it. In his best lyrics, Mick Jagger is a master of equivocation, and this response equivocates in such a way that it is clear that between '67 and '68 Jagger had changed his tacks. Beggar's Banquet-era Jagger sympathized not with the need for community (necessarily) but with the impetus to change things violently. The protagonist of the song is clearly Jagger himself, in his position as rock star, as he surveys the violent protests which happened that year in Paris and elsewhere. The verses describe the scenes of these demonstrations in sympathetic terms, backed with energetic hard rock music, but the chorus says everything Jagger needs to say- "But what can a poor boy do/ 'cept to sing for a rock and roll band/ cause in sleepy London town there's just no place for/ a street fighting man." Rather than pointing the finger, as in "2000 Light Years from Home," at the space-cadet hippies, Jagger spoofs himself and his own political impotence. What's key to remember is that Jagger doesn't seem to be merely critiquing violence in the name of politics- he actually tries to identify with it. And because his '68 response is more personal and more sympathetic than his '67 response, the renascence is to a sense of attempted, if thwarted, community with the European protestors of '68. This is even as the rest of Beggar's Banquet brings back the musical roots which had been lost on Satanic Majesties- the straightforward blues of "Prodigal Son," the mock-country of "Dear Doctor," even the gospel-tinged "Salt of the Earth." "Sympathy for the Devil," the other lyrical showpiece of the album, points a finger at religion as a source of societal ills- "as heads is tails/ just call me Lucifer," God and the Devil are the same thing (in Jagger's construct), and if the song is only tangentially related to the counterculture, it upped the Stones ante as iconoclastic figureheads.

Truth be told, what happened with the Beatles in '68 was even more interesting, simply because everyone in the Sixties was always waiting for what the Beatles would say or do next. John Lennon's "Revolution," released first as the B-side of "Hey Jude" and second on the Beatles double-album (The White Album), presents a response so ironic, detached, and (even) condescending to the counterculture that it makes Lennon's own countercultural activites in the Seventies seem suspect. Lennon's basic stance, in this lyric, is of someone listening to a revolutionary spell out to him the changes he or she plans to enact. Lennon rejects violence outright, but doesn't, as a lyricist, offer any alternatives, and ends on a platitude. It's an underwhelmed and underwhelming response, and deflates any sense that the Beatles were going to step up as a political force to be reckoned with. The Beatles, the eponymous '68 double-album, side-steps political themes and in a sense desperately gropes for some sense of cohesion. The diffuse nature of the four sides makes it so that the album is always cutting into its own momentum; it zig-zags, rather than builds energy. The music is not lavishly produced as Sgt. Pepper was, and many of the songs are simple and blunt. That having been said, it certainly can't be called a return to the Beatles' roots, and the sound collage "Revolution #9" takes the Beatles even further than "A Day in the Life" did into avant-garde territory. If there is a renascence here, it's to the idea of "unstaged" Beatles music, which Magical Mystery Tour had extended after Sgt. Pepper.

If the Kinks and the Velvets are less notable in terms of the "renascence myth," it's because their '68 releases worked as natural extensions of what they were doing in '67. White Light/ White Heat was a foray into the heart of the musical beast for Lou Reed et al, with the seventeen-minute epic "Sister Ray" swelling into realms of pure avant-noise and intense sludge where no rock band had gone before. It maintained the theme of sexual deviance from the first Velvets' album. Ray Davies, on The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society, developed the idea behind "Waterloo Sunset" into an entire album- the songs explore memories, the past, aging, conservation of psycho-affective resources, and the like. Davies and Reed continued to write in such a way that what they were courting was a kind of timelessness. The '68 recordings of the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, and Velvets have aged well, and what they demonstrate is a development past the notion of countercultural engagement into a more inward, introspective space. "Street Fighting Man," especially, is definitive, because in it Jagger can be heard to sing for the rest- the idea is that musicians and artists can only have a limited amount of political efficacy. They play and they write- what else can they do? Looking at what has followed in rock from '68, rock musicians have yet to wield any significant political power in the West. It may or may not be a good thing, but it's a fact.

Waterloo Sunset

What most of Lou Reed's characters have in common is their extremity; if they carry with them the stuff of human essences, these essences are demonstrated in extreme circumstances. Extremity was much in evidence in 1967- the counterculture was becoming massive, the Vietnam War raised the stakes of generation vs. generation all through the West, and the feeling in the air suggested revolution in almost every major American and English metropolis. The Beatles, Stones, and Doors responded directly; Lou Reed went "left of center" by writing about deviance and transgression; but, among the major rock songwriters, the most notable outright rebellion was enacted by Ray Davies of the Kinks. His major achievement of 1967, the single "Waterloo Sunset" (which reached #2 in England but barely charted in the U.S.), is a portrait not of countercultural or marginal solidarity but of absolute populist normalcy. It's a song about a poor old man nearing the end of his life. He lives in a poor section of London and watches average people from his window. It's voyeurism, but not the deviant voyeurism found in Lou Reed's characters- it's the harmless voyeurism of the kind of quotidian figure that most rock fans found (and still find) banal. What's remarkable about Davies' song is that he finds a way to make the old man not only not banal but lovable- he's a sympathetic figure, even in his loneliness. His emotional life is dictated by his solitude, but the imaginative vista opened by watching people from his window allows him to transcend his loneliness. What Davies accomplishes in this song is no less than a complete realization of the task William Wordsworth set himself in the early nineteenth century- to take simple lives and make them interesting by tracing in them the timeless, profound laws that bind the entire human race together. As such, "Waterloo Sunset" has a greater claim to timelessness than anything else in rock that was released in '67, and perhaps for all time. It is an almost perfect work of art.

What's most perfect about "Waterloo Sunset" is the complete economy with which Ray Davies paints his portrait. Details tumble out about the figure in the song in such a way that we can see him and his abode clearly- it overlooks the dirty Thames, and the Waterloo tube station, and the old man has weak enough sight that taxi lights hurt his eyes. What winds up being most interesting about the old man is that we can see in him the basic nature of the artist, the visionary- he makes up the story in his head of "Terry meeting Julie" at Waterloo Station, and is diligent enough to see the same people meeting at the same tube station every Friday night. In his own consciousness, the figures he has created ("Terry and Julie") triumph over the filthiness and overcrowded quality of Waterloo Station by "crossing the river," a solitary couple who have no need to join any herd. That, in a certain sense, is where the fun starts for active listeners, because the lyrics of "Waterloo Sunset" are deceptively simple. "Terry and Julie" cross over the river of loneliness, which the old man cannot; but because he joins them in his mind, he feels satisfied with himself, "safe and sound" in his realization that through his imagination he is not completely alone. In a manner of speaking, he dissolves into them. The literary conventional term "Negative Capability" (a creation of John Keats') has to do with this- the ability to dissolve one's self into something else completely. Davies' protagonist does this instinctively, and there's nothing in the song to suggest that he is actually an artist of any kind. If he is, as he says, "in paradise" watching the sun set over a London slum, it's because the sunset (which works metaphorically, too; it's the sunset of his own life) hasn't extinguished either his ability to feel or his ability to imagine. The pathos in "Waterloo Sunset" is balanced with joy.

"Waterloo Sunset" works not only for what is included in it, but for what is left out. Ray Davies, more than the other rock songwriters, had the notion that what the counterculture never took mind of was the process of aging. The Sixties idiomatic expression "never trust anyone over thirty" could only work for so long; eventually, no matter what ideals young people ascribed to, they would have to grow old and die just like everyone else. How many of the Terrys and Julies knew they would eventually wind up like the old man in "Waterloo Sunset"? But the charm of the old man in the song is that he doesn't seem to care; he knows the frailty of human bonds, but is too wise to judge the young for doing what comes naturally for them. And the intimacy that is sexy in Lou Reed could be taken as pathetic here; after all, Terry and Julie don't realize they are being watched and perhaps fantasized about. But, if we wind up respecting Davies' old man, it's because he doesn't impose himself on the two lovers, other than to affirm them. They, too, may be too old to love at some point. "Waterloo Sunset" dares to critique the counterculture by implying that it will end the same for individuals no matter what young collectives believe they can accomplish. "A Day in the Life" offers a probable death or suicide; "Waterloo Sunset" offers acceptance and quiet resignation.

What makes "Waterloo Sunset" so interesting, forty-five years later, is that so few rock songwriters since have addressed the process of aging in a mature way. Lou Reed, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and Bob Dylan have all tried; if Ray Davies' first attempt is still the best portrait of aging as a process in the rock canon, it's because these other songwriters' attempts lack imagination. Musically, "Waterloo Sunset" is compact, compressed, and as catchy as any Beatles' song; it actually songs melodically influenced by Paul McCartney. If it sounds modest, next to the other centerpiece songs we have been discussing ("Heroin," "A Day in the Life," "2000 Light Years from Home," "When the Music's Over"), it's because Ray Davies' ambition was of a more subtle nature than the other songs. Ray Davies has always been very stubborn about doing things against fads and trends; the Kinks have few songs from this era longer than three or four minutes, and most of their Sixties records sound cheaply recorded and produced. For Davies, the song was always the thing, and the songs needed to speak for themselves. It's the inverse of the Sgt. Pepper "kitchen sink" approach; as bare-bones and lean as a hit single (in England, at least) could be. "Waterloo Sunset" is also evidence of the astonishing progress in maturity rock music had made in two or three years; whether it's matured past "Waterloo Sunset" in the intervening years is another issue.

Left of Center

The handful of lyricists involved in the '67 triumvirate we have been discussing were writing satires and critiques of the then-nascent counterculture, and these satires and critiques were aimed at the center of said counterculture. Elders in the West would've liked for the counterculture to remain marginal, but by '67 it was massive enough (backed by the Baby Boomers' demographics) that it was impossible to ignore. What was counterculture, taken to the nth? What types of characters dwelt in the margins of the counterculture? In New York, Pop-Art icon Andy Warhol was bypassing the countercultural center and making movies employing the junkies, speed freaks, transvestites, and deviant fetishists who were too left even for the left- marginal characters leading extreme lives. Warhol's protege Lou Reed produced a cache of songs in '67 which reflected similar concerns. The characters who populate The Velvet Underground and Nico have an inverse relationship to the Beatles' Everyman who dominates Sgt. Pepper- Reed's characters, like Jean Genet's, manifest extreme Otherness. To add "Heroin" as a centerpiece to the triumvirate of centerpieces I have already erected ("A Day in the Life," "2000 Light Years from Home," "When the Music's Over"), is to flip a bunch of positions at once. "Heroin," lyrically, is a dramatic monologue in the first person- it is the closest rock has ever come to Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy. Rather than being crushed by banality because he is part of it, as in the Beatles, Reed's protagonist rebels against banality by crucifying himself on the cross of his drug.

The dynamic between "Heroin" and the Stones is even more intriguing- Reed's subject owns his own loneliness, is fully cognizant of the destructiveness of the society he lives in and is staging a conscious rebellion. He may be alienated, but in his self-possession he is certainly "home." It's his marginal position which allows him to see his society so clearly- what's visible from the outside in isn't necessarily visible from the inside, and if you're seeing clearly there's no chance to fly off into space. The Doors and the Velvets back and forth set up a dynamic between a personal and a generalized apocalypse- Reed grants Morrison's digressions a concrete center. Reed's protagonist talks from inside "What've they done to the Earth/ What've they done to our fair sister?" The rebellion enacted in "Heroin" is against destruction with more destruction- the degradation of the protagonist's body is a manner of elevating his soul. It's the spiritual trumping the material, and the act of ingesting heroin (which is rendered dramatically in the rise and fall of the music) a manifestation of courage and heroism, just as the Beatles' Everyman cowers behind routinized behaviors and the Stones' space cadets pretend to be enjoying their trips. The irony is that we don't have to grant Reed's protagonist the premise he presents- we can interrogate whether or not we find him to be courageous for injecting heroin. What if we find him to be merely narcissistic? He wants us to believe it's more transcendental (and spiritual) not to care, to disengage or not even register "the dead bodies piled up in mounds," to "nullify (his) life."

Living on the margins is a double-edged sword- you get to see the massive and imposing center more clearly, but what (and who) sustains you? What's your community? There is no "you" to the "I" in "Heroin"; but the "you" is there in the background, and Reed's audience was (and is) encouraged to put together the clues as to how this particular Hamlet became this haunted. It would be difficult to read "Heroin" as a satire- the lyrics are presented in deadly earnest, and we are encouraged to sympathize with the protagonist. In many ways, it's the warmest of the four centerpieces, and the most human. That's a distinguishing characteristic of Lou Reed's writing, right up until the present day and against Jagger, Morrison, and Lennon-McCartney- his characters breathe, they have an emotional life. Other songs on The Velvet Underground and Nico, like "I'll Be Your Mirror," represent the joy of simple (and complex) human connection in a way that eludes the Beatles, Stones, and Doors. It's an interesting conglomerate of sensibilities- marginal characters leading lives on-edge, but still able to relate, rather than alienated center-dwellers. The fact that male and female voices alternate on the album adds a sense of androgyny to the songs- it could be glossed as simple bisexuality (as if bisexuality were ever simple) or an enactment of the communal impulse that the Beatles, Stones, and Doors skewer.

It's another irony that's difficult to steer around- that margin-dwellers are capable of maintaining closer relationships than centrists. One reason that the deviant sex of "Venus in Furs" is so evocative is that the roles participants play in S & M scenarios are intimate. If "Venus in Furs" didn't sound so intimate (and distinctive, owing to John Cale's contribution), it would be merely imposing and eerie. As is, it's also touching. There's a whole history of this kind of literature- the intimacy of marginality and transgression. But before Lou Reed and the Velvets, there'd never been anything in popular music quite like this. In a sense, the Velvets rebelled against the timeliness of the Beatles, Stones, and Doors with timelessness- naked portraits of human essences rendered in such a way that they aren't limited by the confines of '67.

Sharper Pepper

Sometime during 2007, I posted to my blog Stoning the Devil about Sgt. Pepper. I called the post "Not Getting Better all the Time: The profound darkness of Sgt. Pepper." The basic premise of the post was somewhat complex- that because Sgt. Pepper ends in tragedy ("A Day in the Life"), the "staged" aspect of the album, which ends before "A Day in the Life," constitutes a series of consecutive illusions, which "A Day in the Life" denudes. Thus, "Getting Better" becomes "Not Getting Better," "Fixing a Hole" becomes "Not Fixing a Hole," etc. Listening to the album in this manner ("backwards," as it were), it becomes clear that this interpretive vista configures Pepper as a kind of mirage, offering peace and love vibes and dream visions on the surface while retaining a dark core of alienation and ultimate disillusionment. It is malign. Why hasn't it been taken that way? Partly, it's because critics haven't set themselves the task of listening to the album according to its tragic ending- they stick to the glossy surface, ignoring the way "A Day in the Life" is set apart from the other, "staged" tracks. What's illusory in the staged tracks are the myths of the Sixties- a track like "With a Little Help from my Friends" features a playful call and response, as an Everyman (it could be the same Everyman we later hear in "A Day in the Life") interrogates himself and finds himself to be well situated. The trap-door is that there's no one else in the song- he could be talking to himself. The structure of the verses, musically, allows Paul McCartney to incorporate the kind of bass runs and chord changes which Brian Wilson employed on Pet Sounds- it's a sound of plaintive, cloying innocence. This innocence is up in smoke by the last piano crash of "A Day in the Life."

The quizzical ruminations of "Fixing a Hole" also offer a kind of original philosophical innocence, without involving its protagonist in any serious relationships. For such a communal collection (that's how it was originally taken), there are precious few genuine relationships investigated on Sgt. Pepper (the way there are on Rubber Soul)- the album has a solipsistic streak. The two relationship narratives, "She's Leaving Home" and "Lovely Rita," offer glimpses of failed or superficial relationships. It's a theme that runs through Satanic Majesties, too, if not Strange Days- the Beatles and Stones explore an inability to relate at a critical juncture when the counterculture most emphasized relationships, and communal togetherness. The cruel irony (for those watching closely) was that Sgt. Pepper's solipsism was an anti-response to the counterculture, rather than an affirmation of it. But the superficially dazzling aspects of Sgt. Pepper- its lavish production values (which were unprecedented for a pop album in '67), Pop-Art visuals, and the sense that the Beatles had become auteurs rather than mere pop stars (and that they were taken as representative of their generation's precocity and ambitiousness) won the day, and those listening closely kept their mouths shut. It is a tribute to a generation's ability to blinker itself that the cold artificiality of something "staged," and which ends in tragedy, was taken for a beloved symbol of affirmative cultural progress.

Of the '67 triumvirate (Sgt. Pepper/ Satanic Majesties/ Strange Days), Sgt. Pepper was by far the most commercially successful (was, indeed, phenomenally commercially successful instantly), and the most deceptive. There's even the option of taking Sgt. Pepper, in all its strangeness and ultimate horror, as an extreme black comedy, a kind of satire of the social illusions which were bolstering the counterculture. If so, that makes Satanic Majesties a satire of a satire- warmer (as the Stones tended to be) than the Beatles, but bent along a much more simpatico wavelength with Sgt. Pepper then has generally been supposed. It's also funny that all three albums seem to constitute not only an equivocal response but an outright rejection of the counterculture, rather than an embrace of it. Of the three responses, the Beatles' is the coldest- it may be mystifying for historians to realize the extremely heartwarming response it received. Sgt. Pepper is not only cold but somewhat terrible- the second side of the album is like going down a slippery slope, into the bleak maelstrom of "A Day in the Life." The momentum the second side generates is bloated and empty- the sleazy sex of "Lovely Rita," with its shockingly dark ending (a Beatles trademark in '67/'68), the hideousness of "Good Morning Good Morning" ("Nothing to do to save his life/ call his wife in"), and the rushed phoniness of the "Sgt. Pepper (Reprise)" all point straight to the inevitability of "A Day in the Life," in all its banal deathliness. The first, "up" side of Sgt. Pepper is only more pleasant if not interrogated- a seemingly positive statement like "Getting Better" offers darkling hints ("I used to be cruel to my woman I beat her/ and kept her apart from the things that she loved") more direct and brutish than anything on Satanic Majesties or Strange Days, and the suggestion is that this Everyman (who even sounds, on close inspection, like a version of John Lennon) is both violent and disturbed. It also needs to be put in place that "A Day in the Life" does not definitively end in suicide or death- but what else could its violence and discord signify?

There's another subtext that Sgt. Pepper shares with Strange Days- that dreams and waking states were being confused, in such a way as to suggest that this situation in itself (of the counterculture, and often drug induced) was a kind of nightmare. Whether or not "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was about LSD, it certainly concerned sensory derangement and its appeal, which is being staged (as Jim Morrison does in the song "Strange Days") to be knocked down. "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" is malign for the same reason- a sinister carnival atmosphere with only a hint of anything but joylessness (significantly, the song is in a minor key). It's another swirling nightmare. Sixties counterculture was big on carnivals and carnival atmospheres- "Be-Ins," "Love-Ins," music festivals, and the like. What the Beatles, Stones, and Doors have in common is the sense that, behind the carnvial masks lurked the same sick, suffering marks of humanity as ever. The mirage nature of Sgt. Pepper in particular meant that even as young people in '67 were "bathing in warm sounds," they were also inadvertantly hitting a slab of ice.

Apocalypse Then

By 1967, many rock albums were already doing what serious art is meant to do- respond cogently and relevantly to the times that engendered it. If "Peace and Love" was flatulent instantly to intelligent minds, it was because behind the gaudy patina lay the same paranoid hostility which characterized the West in the twentieth century. While the Rolling Stones responded with satire, the Doors responded with a kind of impressionistic imagism which was more haunting than caustic, more Poe than Swift. If Strange Days, released in late '67, is the Doors masterpiece, and works as a companion piece to Satanic Majesties, it is because the Doors, in particular Jim Morrison, picked up the idea that the combined effects of the Vietnam War and the "drug" component of the counterculture was to render a kind of strangeness visible in American society, a torque in the direction of twistedness. The centerpiece of the album is the final track, "When the Music's Over." If put aside two of the other signifying rock tracks of '67, "A Day in the Life" and "2000 Light Years from Home," the Doors are distinguished from the Beatles and Stones because they are visionary rather than nihilistic or snide. What "When the Music's Over" offers, in fact, is a vision not only of a society come unhinged (at least where the youth sector was concerned), but of apocalypse, the end of human life as we know it.

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "without music, life would be a mistake," but Morrison seems to be using "music" in the broad sense, or as a metaphor- music is anything which sustains human life in a harmonious way. Significantly, the song is written from a first person perspective- uniquely, Morrison meanders between addressing a collective "you" and developing a personal narrative. The album is called Strange Days, and the images in its signature song are strange- faces in mirrors, screaming butterflies, fenced portions of earth, faces in windows. One of Morrison's lyrical conceits, and a well-documented one, is that he was "writing from the unconscious," much in the manner of the Surrealists, channeling imagery without the mediation of his conscious mind into extended collages like "When the Music's Over." If this piece comes across as less scattershot than "The End" from the Doors eponymous first album, it is because it's more clearly aimed at addressing a then au current situation, and making it a metaphor for an ultimate human reality. The scope of the song is ambitious; if it achieves less than it wants to achieve, it makes a point that's as memorable as the Beatles and Stones '67 high-water marks- the apocalypse is all around us, someone's life is always ending. The way the Doors' music punctuates Morrison's lyrics is also interesting- the ebbs and flows, periods of quiet alternating with dramatic explosions, act out the premise of apocalypse in musical terms. Robby Krieger's atonal guitar solo is particularly effective, opening up a vista that turns discord into beauty in a "strange" way.

If much of the movement of the piece seems self-conscious, it demonstrates that self-consciousness and ambition did not need to be damning epithets for rock musicians. Perhaps the more pertinent chiasmus here is between the Doors and the Beatles- the Beatles create, in "A Day in the Life," a deceptively simple, despairing Everyman and kill him off (enactment of a "personal apocalypse"); the Doors generalize to include all of humanity in their collage, and they conclude in a portentous, if not completely and barely bleak, way. If the Velvet Underground have a version of this, it is "Heroin"; but the situation in that lyric is specialized against addressing society at large. What the protagonist implicates, he implicates indirectly. Ray Davies is another songwriter who never tackled anything quite this ambitious in a single song, even if what can be glossed in a piece like "Waterloo Sunset" is just as rich, inhabited by a different kind of Everyman than the one in "A Day in the Life." The smaller pieces on Strange Days use imagery that can be construed as metaphorical or not- "Horse Latitudes," for example, is a poem accompanied by a backwash of oceanic-sounding white noise. In the poem, a ship is forced to dump part of its cargo of horses into the still sea in order to sail forward. The title track presents "guests" who "sleep from sinning" and "hear me talk of sin/ and you know this is it," which suggests not only drugs but heroin specifically (it is documented that Jim Morrison's paramour, Pamela Susan Courson, was a heroin user).

Robby Krieger's "Love Me Two Times" could've been set up as the "Light My Fire" of the album- it lacks the exoticism of "Fire," but has an interesting subtext. "Love me two times/ I'm goin away" can be understood to reference those drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Doors singles in the Sixties were generally hit-or-miss, and "Love Me Two Times" missed. The album itself was only a modest commercial success, despite the Doors high hopes. "People are Strange" was another failed single, which later became a classic-rock radio staple. It was as blatantly personal as anything Jim Morrison ever wrote- "People are strange/ when you're a stranger/ faces look ugly/ when you're alone/ women seem wicked/ when you're unwanted/ streets are uneven/ when you're down." Imagery is important on Strange Days because what inheres in it is an emphasis on sight and "seeing"- "My Eyes Have Seen You," "I Can't See Your Face in my Mind," the "wet forests" of "Moonlight Drive." What Morrison seems to imply when he sings "gazing on a city/ under television skies" is that even the skies have been co-opted by modern technology, in pursuit of the ocular. The phrase "carnival dogs" that comes up in "I Can't See Your Face in my Mind" is representative, because the sound of Ray Manzarek's organ is carnival-esque. What Strange Days amounts to, more than Sgt. Pepper or Satanic Majesties, is a kind of carnival or freak show- a site for the fantastic and the grotesque. As a response to the then-nascent counterculture, the Doors album functions as a circus mirror, rather than a mirage like Sgt. Pepper or a satire like Satanic Majesties. The general sensibility is cinematic (Morrison and Manzarek were film students at UCLA)and European enough to make Los Angeles an unlikely birthplace.

Satanic Stones!

It is taken for granted by most Rolling Stones aficianados that their 1967 album Their Satanic Majesties' Request is not one of their major achievements. It's seen to be a turgid, botched response to the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper- a misstep on the road back to blues, roots, and solid rock. This may or may not be the case; but whether Satanic Majesties is taken as a period piece or an achievement, it is, in and of itself, a unique anomoly in the Stones catalogue. In 2012, it sounds more clearly parodic than it did in its time- rather than an imitation of Sgt. Pepper, Satanic Majesties satirizes the communal ambience that made Sgt. Pepper an instant countercultural monument. But one question Sgt. Pepper has always begged to begin with is, how communal is it? What does it, as a gestalt, espouse? It is easy to forget (as the counterculture was eager to) that Sgt. Pepper ends in tragedy- the show over, a depressed Everyman (rather than a countercultural participant) dying or committing suicide. What does Lennon/McCartney's Everyman have to do with the counterculture? Nothing. Is his depair and ennui the result of not participating in peace, love, and pot? Or is what the Beatles are showing us that this is what life on earth is reducible to- the conflation of dreams and waking states into an ultimate and horrifying banality? Whatever way you choose to construe it, "A Day in the Life" is a work of tragic art that topples whatever momentum the communal vibe accrues on the slab of vinyl that was Sgt. Pepper in '67.

Satanic Majesties has its own "Day in the Life" moment- "2000 Light Years from Home." The key to Mick Jagger's lyrical stance in this song is the split he creates between first and second person approaches- the song presents an "I" speaking to a "you." What is important is that the Stones steered around the communal vibe that intermittently shows up on Sgt. Pepper- "2000 Light Years" creates an image in which the Stones (or at least Mick Jagger) are on one side, the counterculture on the other; the Stones stand alone, rather than joining; the Stones stay grounded while everyone else (their peers and audience) flies into space. Along the lines of the higher echelons of popular culture, you could draw a line from the '67 Stones to Marlon Brando in "The Wild Ones"- rebelling against everything, including the countercultural rebels who constituted one of the back-bones of their fan-base. In '67, a premium was put on "trips," and sci-fi/space metaphors were all the rage. Jagger's sarcasm implied the bare human truth of the situation- hippies on "trips" were not exempted from the discomfort, anxiety, and alienation that have always been attendant on the rest of the human race. Just as the Beatles' Everyman, Jagger's "trippers" have to confront the ultimate banality of human emotions and human nature. Even in '67, it's worth noting that the Stones couldn't give up "groove"- it breaks in the middle, but "2000 Light Years" has a beat and you can dance to it. The Stones physicalize what the Beatles abstract.

Other points of interest on Satanic Majesties make it clear that Mick Jagger's lyrical m.o. is sarcasm, satire, and innuendo. Even in '67, sex was never far from the surface for the Stones- "She's a Rainbow," with its provocative lines about a princess who "comes in colors" and "shoots colors all around/ like a sunset goin down," drowns its overtones in baroque, ornate production tricks and fey lyrical mannerisms. It's a porn vignette disguised as a psychedelic love song. If there's an analogue on Sgt. Pepper, it's "Lovely Rita," another porn vignette coyly disguised as a McCartney "slice-of-life." Satanic Majesties is cohesive in a way that the Stones other major albums aren't- it's a reaction, not only to Sgt. Pepper but to the counterculture at large. Because it opens with "Sing this all Together," which is so broad and blunt in its appeal to the communal ethos of '67 that it's difficult not to take as satire (especially from a lyricist known for barbs), and because "Sing this all Together" reprises at the end of the first side, Satanic Majesties actually has more of a claim to cohesiveness than Sgt. Pepper does (in which a line is drawn, for most of the album, between musicians and audience). When Jagger decides to play the psychedelia poker-faced, as in "Gomper," he does so in such an arch fashion that the result is more kitsch and camp than it is authentically flower-power. The sci-fi/futuristic imagery that shows up in other songs ("2000 Man," "Citadel"), balanced with dream pieces (Bill Wyman's "In Another Land," "The Lantern"), creates a mood and an ambience of foreboding, that finds its culmination in "2000 Light Years."

Satanic Majesties ends with "On With the Show," which undercuts the foreboding with pure goonishness. Like Sgt. Pepper, Satanic Majesties is "staged"; but it ends with derisive laughter, rather than death. One of the subtexts of the Stones in '67 is that they weren't merely symbolic renegades, but actual criminals- they were arrested and tried for drug possession, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were both briefly imprisoned. By the time Satanic Majesties was released, many doubts were in the air about the Stones possible continuing relevance. Rather than placing them back at the top of the heap, Satanic Majesties sunk the Stones down even further- critics chose to ignore what was unique and cohesive, and focus on what was borrowed from the Beatles. It says something about the shallowness of the rock press and rock audiences that no one seemed to see Satanic Majesties in its true light. Musically, the album is as excellent as anything else released in rock that year- "2000 Light Years" eerie introduction and spicy mellotron (courtesy of Brian Jones), the Stones' fliration with baroque chamber-pop (not just "She's a Rainbow" but "In Another Land"), even the bizarre proto-metal hard rock of "Citadel" were the product of the Stones' unwonted will-to-experiment, to stretch the parameters of what they were willing to do musically.

By the spring of '68, the Stones were "back on track" with "Jumpin' Jack Flash," a slab of solid riff-rock that made clear that the Stones could still be commercially viable. Beggar's Banquet, that followed. was a lyrical step forward, even as the music was pared back to rootsy blues and country rock (with occasional detours thrown in). If the making of Satanic Majesties was uncomfortable for the Stones, it was a discomfort that produced a record with more interesting twists and turns than is generally suspected. Artists who are in the process of stretching or groping to find some new terrain will often produce something more novel than those who feel sure of their steps. In an important sense, Sgt. Pepper and Satanic Majesties are twins- though one was perceived as a masterpiece and one as a misstep, both are equivocal responses to an all-consuming counterculture, from young British musicians who were intelligent enough to know how it all might end up. Sgt. Pepper, in rock culture, has been canonized; Satanic Majesties deserves a re-listen. It is the only Stones album that could conceivably be called avant-garde- if it is "satanic," it is because it rebels against the confines of avant-garde earnestness as well.

"Rock Wax": On Pink Floyd (Adam Fieled and Matt Stevenson)

AF: Matt, I was wondering if you could go a little bit into your memories and experiences of Pink Floyd's music: where and how you heard Floyd for the first time, what eras of Floyd music were important for you, and what their place in rock history is?

MS: I was aware of Floyd from classic rock radio, which is to say, THE WALL and DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. I had the usual WALL obsession phase rather late, as was the case with many of the stations of my adolescent development.

My introduction to the deeper catalog occurred during my first stint at college, at Susquehanna University. I was invited to a "party"/smoke session by a friend who lived in an off-campus frat house (where Murray Head - I think that was his name - who taught philosophy - was once seen literally dancing on a table). I remember being in the smoke room, with a good buzz on, when the stereo system began to play a menacing instrumental that sounded very much like the Dr. Who theme. I sat upright and asked, what the hell was this? It was fascinating. One of my friends told me it was Pink Floyd’s MEDDLE album. Right about then, a gruesome distorted vocal growled out: ONE OF THESE DAYS, I'M GOING TO CUT YOU IN TO LITTLE PIECES....Terrifying!

My response to terror and unease - sensations I don't enjoy - is to work through them if they're not coming from something obviously physically inimical. So I popped into the campus bookstore later that week and shoplifted a copy of MEDDLE, still possibly my favorite Floyd album.

On my roommate's advice, I also got a copy of DARK SIDE OF THE MOON and laid down one night with a head full of hemp and some headphones to "really get the experience." I hadn't heard the full album before, so I wasn't ready for the Nick Mason-orchestrated sound collage at the beginning. Consequently, when the screaming started, I bolted upright and tore off the headphones. It took me a minute to calm down, rewind the tape and try it again.

I notice that fear is a key emotion in the aspects of Floyd's "atmosphere." It's even there in the Barrett material - alienation and anxiety. You hear it in "Pow R Toc H" and "Jugband Blues." But the big spectral instrumentals, from "Saucerful of Secrets" on, have that dark vacuum chill of outer space. DSOTM is musically pretty, but still pretty grim. Floyd's aggression came in the form of volume and strangeness rather than velocity and harshness (though they could be pretty harsh if they wanted: "Nile Song" for example).

I suspect that the chill comes from a lack of pure improvisation, or is somehow connected to it. Floyd's compositional style involves those big architectural structures we've mentioned, which may incorporate greater or lesser degrees of improv but bounded by the overall push of the composition. "Echoes" on MEDDLE is the classic of the type. Compare it to the more abstract (and scary!) stuff on the studio part of UMMAGUMMA, probably their wildest (and most Eris-influential) music. Also compare to ATOM HEART MOTHER, not my favorite and incidentally the most typically pseudo-classic prog-rock of their stuff.
Later Floyd...I'd have to say that they delivered on the "concept album" concept better than anyone. The Kinks tended to be very narrative with their rock operas. Time and many critics have led to a re-evaluation of SGT PEPPER as a not-quite-successful effort. TOMMY and QUADROPHENIA were intermittently successful, but kind of obscure. LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY much the same. But on DSOTM, ANIMALS, and THE WALL, it was quite clear what Waters was talking about. He managed to craft intelligent material in a way that rock fans (and succeeding generations of rock fans) can relate to. This is partly because he was stung by critic's reviews of spacey Floyd albums as meaningless.

Without getting to into his own material, we should discuss the extent and limitations of Barrett and the catalyst to Floyd's initial success. We can also discuss the way that Floyd was the main British band to work with light shows and full-environment performances, influenced by rumors of the Grateful Dead and other San Francisco acts plus the pop art/op art/multimedia art happenings around London in the 60s.

AF: Well, I can say that Barrett-era Floyd and the sort of shows they did were a huge influence on me. When they were “The Pink Floyd,” Barrett and the others did a series of performances associated with something called the London Free School. As I understood it, the London Free School was a loosely knit organization oriented around putting on rock shows and other performances in a multi-media context: rock with movies, movies with poetry, etc. I’ve always been attracted by the ambience of multi-media in the arts, and in the mid-Aughts I put together something called the Philly Free School here, in emulation (I thought) of the London Free School, and we hosted a string of multi-media performances mixing all the art forms we could in as Swinging London-ish a fashion as we could. Syd Barrett, as a talented painter who was also a talented rock songwriter, was an excellent avatar for that whole vibe. What has been implicit in Floyd from the beginning is that music is never seen to be enough: there has to be some spectacle to go along with the music to enliven it in a live context. It may be that one of the reasons this was is that the band members all had more advanced ideas about popular music than other pop musicians of their generation: they were products of a relatively sophisticated middle-class environment (Cambridge), rather than coming out of the proletariat. If I don’t consider them pretentious, it’s because, as you already noted, their ambitiousness musically has always been undercut with the sense that they build a real sense of harmony and beauty into their songs, to make them not just palatable but enjoyable, in a manner that other psychedelic and or prog-rock bands didn’t. Barrett wrote killer hooks, and in songs like “Arnold Layne,” actually tackled risque subject matters in a way that few else had.

As for “Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” if it remains a psychedelic masterpiece to me it’s because the “spacy” elements (“Interstellar Overdrive,” “Pow R Toc H”) are balanced by the whimsical pop stuff in such proportions that the album never drags. There isn’t much platonic child-like innocence in pop music, and scarecrows and bikes and Siam cats were and remain an essential diversion away from both the sleaze and grime of much rock music (even good stuff like the Stones) and the nihilism of later-era, Waters-dominated Floyd. They also provided an interesting template for mid-era, between-Piper-and-Dark Side Floyd, and people like Robyn Hitchcock have made sure that no one’s ever going to forget Syd. In terms of weighing who Syd was, what’s your feeling about the whole child-like innocent vibe? Also: did Waters turn to some kind of nihilism in his lyrics just to rebel against Syd, “spaciness,” and the way the whole band started?

MS: Re: the origins of Floyd - your "Philly Free School" is quite similar to the impulse behind the UFO club/London Free School/IT magazine scene that produced Floyd (and Soft Machine) in the swinging London psychedelic & art scene; aside from the obvious parallels of multimedia happenings, the London scene was inspired greatly by second-hand reports of the West Coast/San Fran scene - Ken Kesey's parties and then the psyche club scene in San Francisco. The idea of a rock band having their own light show crew was inspired by reports of the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead. And of course, there were the drugs and the new technologies, creating a bit of a scene just as they did in the US. So PFS seems to me very much part of The Tradition. Personally, I'm proud when I feel Radio Eris is part of The Tradition.

Anyway, it's interesting to consider that the Floyds had the interest in experimentation, Cage, Stockhausen, electronic compositions like Morton Slobotnik, etc, because being relatively privileged they could afford to be weird. Perhaps it takes the urge to commercial success (and consequent discipline and craftsmanship) that came from working class desperation, plus the willingness to be bold and experiment that came from the art school background, to create the formula that pushed the big bands over the top.

An interesting tangent: There's a lot of back'n'forth influence between the Floyds and the Beatles. If you listen to ABBEY ROAD and DARK SIDE OF THE MOON, you'll here a lot of the very same synth, guitar, and keyboard sounds, and not just cause they were in the same studios. Also, the somewhat working-class Beatles, having their initial success, started making the London psyche scene and were introduced to weird noises partly by events at which Pink Floyd performed. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure Barrett's pop songwriting was very much inspired by the Beatles. And if it hadn't been for the commercial prospects created by Barrett's way with a song, Floyd would never have had any serious management, which allowed them to capitalize on their initial success, creating the breathing space needed to synthesize their experimental and commercial sides.

A quick word about Roger Waters' lyrics: Rog's nihilism seems to be largely personal neuroses coupled with a Marxist social conscience. The lucidity of the lyrical content to Floyd from DSOTM on, while influenced by Rog's personality, was very much (as far as I can tell from interviews I've read) a reaction to the hurtful comments of British rock critics, taking Floyd to task for being abstract and experimental at a time that the counter-cultural zeitgeist was zagging towards MC5-style social radicalism. So in a sense, yeah, Rog's lyrics darkened, but less as a direct rebellion against Syd. The ghost of Syd haunted Roger all through the latter phases of the band's career from DSOTM through WISH YOU WERE HERE to the WALL.

"It could never have happened without (Syd), but it couldn't have gone on with him" was the general take on the situation expressed by the other founding members of the band. It's interesting to speculate whether a Floyd with Syd could have delivered work like DSOTM. Would a break have to have occured anyway? A common strategy of the music industry is to focus on the primary songwriter in a band and run a divide-and-conquer maneuver at some point, as the songwriters (and the song rights) are the main source of income. It's possible that such pressures would have fissured the band anyway. I might suggest that without the romantic Hanged Man/Fisher King character in their origins, and the psychic tragedy associated with the story, Floyd would not have had some of the...magic? Aura? which contributed to their eventual success. Peter Jenner and others will talk about how, once Barrett was definitely out of the band and not able to write usefully - preventing even a Beach Boys type of arrangement where Brian would stay home and compose songs the band would perform without him on the road - pressure was bought to bear on the band to step up and start writing. "Julia Dream" is occasionally mocked for being an obvious attempt to imitate Syd's style. Likewise "Point Me At The Sky" (a song I think is really cool but apparently not that successful commercially). Some fans swear there's a whispered "sssSyd" at the end of "Julia Dream." I think that this accounts for the transitional period with lots and lots of instrumentals but little lyrics of consequence until DSOTM came along. Sometimes they'd stumble on something for the vocals to do, like "Nile Song," but it's nothing to build a big fan base on... as with most bands, either you like their flavor of filler or you don’t.

AF: Okay. The back and forth between Floyd and the Beatles is certainly interesting. If Floyd have an advantage to me, it’s because their albums sustain a cohesive mood, while most of the Beatles records are all over the place, mood wise. Paul McCartney has talked extensively about his adventures in Swinging London among the avant-garde cognescenti, and the result we hear in a track like “A Day in the Life” is striking, and influenced by some of the then au current names you mentioned. Here’s a twist, though: why did the media react to the Beatles like they were prophets and seers, and (then and now) pay very little attention to Floyd? The Beatles were “personalities,” while the Floyd guys seemed to seek to be faceless. It would be funny, if a bit daffy, to think of Syd-era Floyd on the Ed Sullivan Show, or of the early Floyd doing a movie like A Hard Day’s Night, but it didn’t happen that way. Could it have been the middle-class maturity of not wanting the crass aspects of “show biz” to accrue to their work? On the other hand, John Lennon (the only Beatle who grew up solidly middle class) was very vehement about schematizing himself as an artist in later interviews, just as it would be easy to think young Syd or Roger Waters does. And the Beatles are a strange phenomenon simply because they became so powerful and influential to the whole of Western society, just for being rock musicians. Floyd’s power doesn’t seem to work politically, i.e. they’re not on any left-wing frontlines the way Lennon was in the 70s, but if there’s something political about The Wall, it’s in the way it implicates society for crushing individuality out of innocent individuals, both directly (teachers) and indirectly (a war that kills one’s father).

Which brings me to the next issue I thought it would interesting to cover: The Wall. I saw the movie about a month ago, and I found it intermittently gripping. The cartoon stuff, I thought, was a bore and a waste of time. But again, I can’t hear those songs, as trenchantly written as some of them are, and not miss the musicality of Rick Wright that’s gone from the record. There’s a gracefulness to Wright’s Floyd stuff that morphs into something crass and gauche without him in the mix. Do you agree?

MS: Very much agree that Wright's influence is audibly missing in the THE WALL. Interestingly, the tours for TW involved use of a "click track" to keep the band in sync with the stage show...almost all chances for improv were frozen out by now. Old friends of the band (Peter Jenner, Joe Boyd among others) really felt TW was a Roger Waters album. THE WALL seems so much a scream of frustration, and yet at the same time it’s oppressive and over-controlling, both as a recording and as a theatrical production and movie. I've gone back and forth on it over the years; mostly, I think it's a great piece of work that I don't particularly need to hear any given year. It definitely doesn't breathe, sonically, and once could argue that's either the cause or the effect of Roger's freezing Rick Wright out of the band. More on THE WALL at the end of this chuck of gabble.

It's interesting that there was very little marketing of personality with the band after Syd left - their faces rarely even popped up in the cover art, except for UMMAGUMMA and a promotional "newspaper"/program done up for some shows. Members of the band could actually wander about before shows and rarely be recognized - compare that to the lack of privacy experienced by the Beatles. I'd prefer the Floyd approach myself if forced with the choice.

I think the facelessness works with the abstract & spacey aura; compare to my point about later Floyd being much more controlled and insistent on message, whereas the mid-period music works better as wallpaper for one's own thoughts. Somewhere around here we'll find the line Floyd crossed that makes some count them as "prog rock" and the Beatles not "prog rock." Floyd's big, abstract, instrumental compositions and moody instrumentals aren't "songs" properly, and the Beatles mostly did songs. Mostly...the Beatles did some of everything, after all.

Floyd in the media game...Syd did not do well playing the TV game. When Floyd did successive TOP OF THE POPS appearances one year, Barrett apparently had little patience for the lip-synching required. It's noticed that his Carnaby-street finery degenerates from show to show; at the final appearance it's soiled, stained and ragged. On the Syd-era Floyd's US tour, they popped up on a TV show, can't remember on the top of my head - American Bandstand? - and Syd wouldn't talk and leveled a dead-eyed stare in response to the typical dopey questions asked by the host. It's my opinion that the media frenzy of a Beatlemania would've destroyed him even more quickly than his eventual fate as it occurred. In fact, I'd bet it was the aftermath of that experience that disinclined the Floyds from pursuing mass-media-personality status.

There was probably an embrace of counter-cultural values involved. The Beatles were too big; they belonged to everyone, and started out as purveyors of pop who became experimentalists. Pink Floyd started out (after initial scuffles - ever head the EMI acetates of "Queen Bee" and "Leave Lucy?" Of academic interest mostly) as the house band of the cultural underground. You could say the Beatles started commercial and bought in to the counter-culture - they weren't faced with tensions of selling out until well down the line. Floyd as an organization, until DSOTM, constantly danced a line to avoid being labeled as sell-outs, whatever the life-styles and pursuits of the individual members. They did an ad for a French soft drink which created a bit of a flap among their fans and the British rock press for a bit; I think they had to turn around and donate their fee to charity or something, "and we never did drink the damn stuff anyway," Gilmour groused after the fact. DOTSM was the moment where, like the Beatles, they became too big to be counter-anything.

Roger Waters was the most politically engaged Floyd - very active with left wing causes, especially the nuclear disarmament movement. You see echoes of this in the movie of THE WALL. His first wife was a committed neo-Marxist. I think the second was more of a socialist; maybe I'm getting them confused. Nick Mason and Rick Wright both dove cheerfully into their roles as wealthy playboys and tax exiles. Gilmour enjoys work too much to lose himself in than, apparently. Consequently, he was the only member of the band to fight for his role in the teeth of Roger's control-freak-ness.

As a band, Floyd's political stance came more from their origins than their art, except for the anti-commercial art-for-art's-sake stance they settled on in their middle period. There are definitely political aspects to DSOTM, ANIMALS, and THE WALL; not quite so much WISH YOU WERE HERE unless you interpret the critique of the music industry as political - one could, fairly, I suppose. ANIMALS would be their most explicitly political album. But Roger's lyrical pessimism is very de-powering, isn't it? You're basically fucked and trapped by The System.

It's interesting to consider the interplay of Pink Floyd and the English punk movement:

- leftover drop-out political types joined or followed many of the punks. John Lydon could tolerate Hawkwind - aggressive psychedelic guys who followed in Floyd's footsteps and emerged from the same scene - and was a pot-smokin' fan of Kraut-rock bands like Can as a young guy; both his and Sid Vicious' mothers were hippies. Incidentally, when told that Johnny Rotten was recruited into the Pistols in part due to his t-shirt, an old Pink Floyd shirt to which he'd added in marker "I HATE...", Nick Mason chuckled that he'd not have gotten as much mileage from an "I HATE YES" shirt. In interviews, many of the Floyds expressed support for the impulses of the punk movement that often reviled them; they were canny enough at least to see it was much less of a new revolution than it was being advertised as.

- ANIMALS is sometimes considered Pink Floyd's "response" to punk. Many of the new generation of British rock writers hailed it as a sign of life and conscience on the part of old hippies...it was surprisingly well received at the time. Musically it's pretty aggressive compared to DSOTM or WYWH.

- Nick Mason produced the first album by The Damned and I think he dabbled in some other punk group production as well (Meanwhile, Gilmour had helped Kate Bush get her start). BTW as good a place as any to mention the many, many ways "Arnold Layne" was re-worked by various punks. I'm thinking specifically of "Grimly Fiendish' by The Damned, but I know there's a couple of other instances of old Arnold being re-tooled for the new era. Madness, the ska-punks from East London, had a song on similar themes - less cross-dressing, more panty-sniffing on the part of the protagonist. Is it Floyd influence, or is it just some aspect of British culture in general? Don't ask me...

- Syd's cult expanded among fans of bands like The Television Personalities ("I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives") and Barrett and early Floyd numbers were covered by various second-wave punks. It was easier to like Barrett as he went away early and didn't get rich and "sell out."

Re: THE WALL/ TW movie

I think the movie's quite successful. Frankly, it buries TOMMY (to think of one example). Father going off to the war...a part of TOMMY and also The Who's earlier (and for me, better) opus "A Quick One While He's Away." XTC masquerading as The Dukes Of Stratosphere have "(You're A Good Man) Albert Brown" which talks about it some. I suspect we could find a few other examples, but Pete Townshend's the main one that springs to mind. I don't think The Kinks did so much with it. I'm not sure, but The Pretty Thing's SF SORROW concept album might deal with that theme to some extent. I might be mistaken; I haven't heard the whole piece.

TW's over-produced aspects, influence of / lack of Rick Wright, see paragraph at top. Incidentally, consider that THE WALL has the most danceable Pink Floyd ever - Gilmour produces disco and funk sounds all across the album. And disco and late 70's (white) funk is a very controlled, produced style of music. "Brick In The Wall pt 2" sounds like a Niles Rodgers/Chic production, or like the stuff the BeeGees did for SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER. Tight, baby.

AF: The last thing I want to investigate is Pink Floyd’s place in rock music history. Writers who deal with rock music tend to think in clusters: British Invasion (Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who), punk (Pistols, Clash), and so forth. Pink Floyd remain sui generis for a number of reasons: their mystique is all about the albums and not the personalities, their music changed several times in a more substantial fashion than other big-name rock acts, their middle-class stance could be perceived as distant, calculating, and pretentious by a business populated at the top by those from working-class backgrounds, and (besides Syd) they weren’t big on debauchery (an extension of rock stars acting out their flamboyant “personalities” like Keith Moon or, in the 90s, the Gallagher brothers). No one seems to put Roger Waters in the grouping of the “big songwriters” with Neil, Bruce, Bob, Van, Joni, Lou, etc, nor did they give rise to an army the way the Cure and Led Zeppelin did. To make a long story short, Pink Floyd and their legacy remain amorphous.
What key points would help carve an apropos place for them?

MS: I question the phrase "middle-class stance"; should be "bourgeois" to be more precise. Floyd were definitely exemplars of art for art's sake, making the least concession to traditional consumer models of the music industry while still raking in the cash for their live performances during the lower-profile middle period. Interesting that they managed to stay together for a long time compared to most of their peers. I think on could argue the band dissolved at any given point from THE WALL onwards. I'd argue that they were still Pink Floyd as much as the Rolling Stones are anything (for example) all the way through DIVISION BELL. But I wouldn't argue strongly.

Floyd's biggest musical legacy tended to be on the Continent via the Krautrock bands. In a sense, i guess, until DSOTM onwards, they were the biggest cult band in the world, although some would argue that for the Kinks as well. I don't know what to make of the Radiohead phenomena in regards to all this, but I'd be open to the idea that Radiohead followed a similar career path only guided by knowledge of history: early Pop success followed by a move to more abstract sounds in the teeth of conventional industry wisdom, finding continued success there despite not playing the established Brit music industry game. The primary difference to me is that Radiohead came up via the usual Britpop channels, whereas Floyd emerged from the underground. It's easy to forget, but, Syd's pop success aside, they started from the most commercial, idealistic scene in 60's London, and clung to those ideas for a surprisingly long time. They're too big to summarize neatly. Some people love Syd and the myth of the lost mad genius. Some people love them for their space/ambient rock, and the larger part of their audience know them mostly from their hugely successful concept albums. It's similar to the way many Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen fans hate the larger part of the Rolling Stones/Springsteen fandom.

Adam Fieled and Matt Stevenson, 2012

P.S. If you listen to these Floyd tracks in this order, you will be delivered righteously into the arms of extreme space:

Echoes
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
Atom Heart Mother Suite
Careful with that Axe, Eugene
A Saucerful of Secrets