The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter

DARK MIRROR This page intentionally left blank DARK MIRROR The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter Donald Brackett Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brackett, Donald, 1951– Dark mirror : the pathology of the singer-songwriter / Donald Brackett. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99898–1 (alk. paper) 1. Rock music–History and criticism. 2. Rock musicians. 3. Rock music–Writing and publishing. I. Title. ML3534.B687 2008 782.4216409—dc22 2008019907 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 2008 by Donald Brackett All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008019907 ISBN-13: 978–0–275–99898–1 First published in 2008 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10987654321 For Mimi The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror. Marcel Proust Table of Discontents Prologue: No Home on the Range ix Part One: Islands Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter As Solo Artist 1 Chapter 1 The Story Teller: Bob Dylan 11 Chapter 2 The Dream Teller: Brian Wilson 27 Chapter 3 The Torch Bearer: Joni Mitchell 41 Chapter 4 The Role Player: David Bowie 51 Chapter 5 The Risk Taker: Marianne Faithfull 61 Chapter 6 The Rabble Rouser: Tom Waits 73 Chapter 7 The Anger Manager: Elvis Costello 81 Chapter 8 The Dare Taker: Amy Winehouse 91 Part Two: Continents Introduction: The Singer-Songwriter in a Partnership 107 Chapter 9 The Seduction Shouters: John Lennon/Paul McCartney 115 Chapter 10 The Party Givers: Mick Jagger/Keith Richards 127 Chapter 11 The Pretension Wreckers: Pete Townshend/ 135 Roger Daltrey Chapter 12 The Bridge Burners: Paul Simon/Art Garfunkel 147 Chapter 13 The Love Addicts: Lindsey Buckingham/Stevie Nicks 155 Chapter 14 The Emblem Benders: Elton John/Bernie Taupin 163 viii · Table of Discontents Chapter 15 The Structural Units: Jack White/Meg White 171 Afterword: One’s Company, Two’s a Crowd 191 Notes 201 Index 209 Prologue No Home on the Range The inimitable Elvis Costello once remarked, with typical sarcastic bravado, that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. Now, far be it from me to contradict one of our greatest singer-songwriters, not to mention one featured as an ‘‘island’’ in my own book; however, some exception must be taken to the talented Mr. Costello’s observation. First of all, let’s readily admit that he is utterly correct, insofar as music and the songs they convey are best appreciated in the temporal immediacy of the listening experience. But, by reflecting on the songs’ origins, their blueprints so to speak, one can often clarify how such songs occupy the landscape of both our culture and our own personal lives. Thus, we attempt to imagine the biography of sounds and visions and their ancestry in our lives. True, writing about music just might be like dancing about architecture, but it is also equally true that some architecture deserves to be danced to—such as Costello’s own quirky songs, for instance—especially when it seems so crys- tal clear that each song is also a kind of building, a building imagined to contain the message of the song itself, designed and constructed by the writer, and delivered in his or her own distinctive voice. Costello’s songs are little houses that take our breath away. Songs which, as a friend of mine recently told me, you can live inside of for a while. But how and why do these talented but often tormented tellers of tall tales speak on our behalf? By telling us how they feel, they also somehow manage to tell us how we feel. We still need an adequate analysis, certainly more than that provided by the acclaimed author of Art and Artist, Otto Rank, of what makes the most creative individuals in the singing-songwriting business also x · Prologue the most personally vulnerable and emotionally wounded, with evidence culled from their own art form: the songs themselves. The talents and pathol- ogies of singer-songwriters are manifested in the songs they write, through their relationships with their partners—whether creative or personal—and through their roles in the larger theatre of our popular culture. They somehow serve as our dark mirror. Ofcourse,poemsandstories,especiallywhensungaloud,werethefirst means of transmitting the magical contents of many diverse cultures, and never more so than in the ancient traditions of preliterate societies. Poems and stories are the telegrams one time in history sends to another one. Person- ally delivered. The process still works the same way, though the tools of trans- mission have changed. The surviving poems and songs from the ancient eras, such as the Indian Vedas (2500 BC), the Sumerian tales of Gilgamesh (3000 BC), and the Greek tales of the Odyssey and Iliad (700 BC), are the earliest form of recorded cul- tural information that chronicles the lives and beliefs of peoples long gone. Poetic songs contain the DNA of a culture and its mythical foundations, whether prehistoric, ancient, or modern. Some songs even seem to predict the future. In preliterate societies, the epic poem was a means of transmitting vital data into the future. In literate societies, the lyric poem, with its shorter and more personal content, became the primary means of interpreting that history and recasting it in subjective and emotional terms that resonated with the readers’ own lives. In the twentieth century, the rise of the singer-songwriter tradition led to a creative mutation fueled by the combination of social wealth, entertainment, electronic media, and loud recording devices designed to convey those messages to mass audiences. Dark Mirror’s motley crew of spiritual savants are the inheritors of a distant tradition that first allowed them a format for their musings, but then each genius alone is the motor that changed that tradition so dramatically that we have to remind ourselves that they are indeed in the historic company of Homer and countless others who performed a similar role for their own societies. Back then, Homer was a kind of primitive radio/television set that his society tuned in to in order to learn about its roots and possible destinies. And for us today? Who knows, perhaps even a controversial rap artist like Eminem fulfills the same contemporary social role for us. Today, gifted story tellers who sing are doing the same service for our contemporary, and global, societies: they are the mirrors into which we gaze to see ourselves captured, contained, and reconfigured. David Baker, an academic participating in a symposium in search of the current lyrical trends with tendrils reaching back into the historic past, has Prologue · xi identified one of the most crucial aspects of today’s chorus of voices—that of dealing with the problems between people. He chose to focus on the core essentials that inform what we write about, sing about, and listen to: ‘‘that we mourn, that we ache, that we want, that we lie, that we forget, that we fail, that we love, that we covet, that we deceive.’’1 Sounds like a catalogue of this book’s subjects and their own oeuvre! Baker pinpoints the main ingredients in the lyric form that construct a song from the stuff of our everyday lives: ‘‘The love poem and the problems of passion, heartbreak and betrayal; the elegy, and the problems of death and loss, or forgetting; the ode, and the problems of social rhetoric.’’2 Once again, a veritable menu of subjects some of today’s songwriters have explored for nearly half a century. Baker also identifies other ‘‘problematics’’ within the lyric mode: the sub- lime, and the problem of beauty; the narrative, and the problem of time; and the most important element at work in the poet’s toil—telling all of this in the first person and in the present tense. Songwriters also manage to perform one of the key jobs of all literary work: to enlarge a solitary existence. Baker comments that ‘‘such is the dream of the lyric in particular, that the self shall be revealed and enlarged.’’3 This is the task that singers of stories achieve so well, so apparently effort- lessly, and so seemingly endlessly in their grasp of the human heart. By revealing and enlarging themselves, they somehow succeed in doing the same for all of us. Indeed, most of the writers and performers written about in this book set out with the same goal in mind, and they all achieved it with varying degrees of success. The result is that by expressing how they feel, they reveal how we feel, or how we might feel, if we could manage to cope with the current issues in each of our lives. Whatever the different styles and sensibilities of the artists being profiled, they all share one element in common—that of using emotionally raw content and personal vulnerability as a vehicle for their art. They each communicate for us by communicating to us, while we often communicate through them. How is it that when we look inside the dark mirrors that these gifted contemporary singer-songwriters hold up for us we see not only ourselves, but everyone else as well, especially the artists themselves, depicted with the most extreme emotional intensity and yet the most accurate and forgiving manner? All of the key subjects in this book are extremely well-known popular music celebrities, among them Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Elvis Costello, TomWaits,JoniMitchell,DavidBowie,PaulMcCartney,andthelateJohn Lennon.

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