Positive Liberty

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away.
- Don McLean

I pretty much stopped listening to new popular music in the mid 1970s around the advent of the disco craze. Rumor has it there has been some pretty good stuff since then, but you couldn’t prove it by me. The Bee Gees’ 1st album was the second LP I ever bought (the first being Sgt. Pepper’s) and it was just too painful to listen to Barry Gibb’s falsetto-ed backing to John Travolta’s leisure suited strutting in Saturday Night Fever. Polyester music for a polyester era. Of course, your musical tastes may differ and to each his own and all that – I don’t claim my aesthetics are superior to anyone else’s; I merely record what my tastes happen to have been. In fact, I’m grateful to the metastatic rise of disco because it prodded me into discovering jazz. But that’s another auto-hagiographic story for another self-indulgent day.

I know a young man whose identity I will withhold lest I embarrass him (Hi, Son!) who sometimes shows remarkable perspicacity and sometimes shows remarkable naiveté. Sometimes in the same sentence! So I was both impressed and disconcerted when he allowed as how he considered Bob Dylan a great songwriter but a problematic (my word, not his) singer, and then added, “… like Janice Joplin.” (Sound of game show buzzer, announcement of consolation prizes, roll closing credits.) I guess you had to be there. Or more to the point in this case, you had to be then.

I wrote recently about Dylan, or at least about his amazingly enduring iconic status. I was thinking the other day about him and all the other Sixties rock idols and icons who, having managed to get old before they died, are now themselves in their sixties or older. And, of course, about Janice and Jimi and Jim and Keith and the others who, mostly as a result of drug overdoses, did a James Dean into youthful immortality. The contrast struck me as especially poignant while watching one of those PBS Great Performance shows they pull out these days exclusively for their bi-monthly Beg-a-thons.

These shows used to air performances of Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic or the Metropolitan Opera but now concentrate almost exclusively on geriatric rockers. (“Because if PBS doesn’t pander to your lowbrow tastes, who will?”) At least we are spared the heartbreak of watching Hendrix’s rheumatic fingers fumbling over a simple chord progression or Joplin’s voice withered and muted by the decades or Jim Morrison seated in front of the phone bank helping some overpaid PBS weasel hawk some crappy compilation set that “can be yours for a membership contribution of $100 or more.” Can A Kiss Christmas with special guests Alice Cooper and Metallica be far behind?

With the sort of generational solipsism we Boomers are so famous for, the implicit themes of many of these Nostalga-thons are that the music, politics, etc. of the Sixties somehow exploded ex nihil into American culture and (cue either Camelot or Woodstock background music) that the Sixties was both a fleeting and sui generis chapter in American history. Neither is correct. Rock is the structural and emotional descendant of that font of all truly American music, the Blues. As for the politics, a case can be made – indeed, I intend to make it in greater detail someday – for the notion that the truly legitimate progeny of 60s radicalism is not modern progressivism’s obsession with universal aggrievement and entitlement but contemporary libertarianism. As rock legend and philosopher George Carlos Santa(ya)na might have said, those who cannot learn from their own history are doomed to hear nothing but their Greatest Hits.

For all her utterly amazing emotionally maturity as a blues singer, Janice Joplin was, in her mid twenties and little more than a year from her death, incredibly naïve. I was recently watching a DVD episode of the Dick Cavett Show in 1969 in which writer Michael Thomas noted (altogether too matter-of-factly) how the previous generation had “failed,” but at least he had the humility to note that his generation (and Joplin’s and mine) might well do the same. As to the latter, Joplin strongly disagreed.

I probably would have back then, too. Live and learn, Son. Live and learn.