Read Online History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus - Free Book Online
Authors: Greil Marcus
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can hear someone driving past his own limits: as a singer, but also as a person consumed by desire and terrified of loss. The song is revealing someone who wasn’t there before. The song isn’t telling him what to do or what to feel; heis reaching for this song because, suddenly, more so with each phrase, he needs to say what it says. His voice is thin, reedy, tailing off the last words of the lines, the words standing out in a new way, with still threatening and harsh, night open, beckoning, a garden under the moon—and when he reaches the last “night,” the last word of the song, he won’t let it go. He caresses the word, lets it fall slowly through his fingers like sand, watching the last grains glisten as they fall, each one its own true note.
With the second verse, Burch adds something to the song that was never there before this day, and never after it. “I remember, that night in May,” he sings, “When you kissed me”—and the hesitation that caught Fred Parris in the first verse now catches Burch. He double-pumps on “When,” letting the word fragment into two parts, and then rushes across the line, letting it shudder through him. He puts everything he has into the four words of the line, and it sweeps him up. “I could hear you say”—but he never says what she said. Maybe he was too consumed by the moment to hear more than the sound of her voice.
The way Burch puts an event into the song— you kissed me —something physical, intimate, irreducible—is shocking. Suddenly this is not just a song. Someone is telling you what happened to him, and you believe him—as pain floods over him, you have to believe him. The girl in the song is present, and he is not just sitting in his room, dreaming ofwhat almost happened, something he wants so much he can almost believe it did happen: “Oh I couldn’t sleep / For on my mind / Was the image / Of a girl / I hope to find,” as the Safaris put it in 1960, embarrassing a good part of the nation as they did so. When you kissed me —it’s a moment that can’t be taken back. “What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me,” Geeshie Wiley sang in 1930 in “Last Kind Words Blues”; that’s where, that day in Austin, life found Don Burch, or the person he was able to become when he sang “In the Still of the Nite.”
A half-century after that afternoon rehearsal, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled “Should Bob Dylan Retire?” “When to Leave the Stage,” ran the subhead: “A generation of music icons is hitting retirement age, along with their baby boomer fans. Is it time for Bob Dylan to hang up his hat and harmonica?” “The issue of whether Mr. Dylan should pack it in has been an enduring parlor game in music circles,” John Jurgensen wrote. “Most alarming to listeners devoted to his seminal recordings: the state of Mr. Dylan’s voice, decades on from its first signs of deterioration. Dr. Lee Akst, director of the Johns Hopkins Voice Center, says it’s impossible to diagnose Mr. Dylan without examination, but . . . ” Illustrating the piece was a remake of the cover of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with the singer and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo hugging his arm as they walkedthrough the snow on a New York street, shining with the pleasure of being in the right place at the right time, embodying youth, love, sex, freedom, and possibility, and so fully that the single block of Jones Street in Greenwich Village in 1963 could open onto every highway and back road in the United States. But now you saw a man and woman from behind. He was heavy and his hair was white; she leaned into him as before, thick and stooped, holding onto her walker in the slick of slush on the pavement. The story was bizarre from its premise: the notion that it was up to the public to decide when Bob Dylan or anybody else should “leave the stage”—which really meant shut up, or die. The subtext was the presentation of age as a
With the second verse, Burch adds something to the song that was never there before this day, and never after it. “I remember, that night in May,” he sings, “When you kissed me”—and the hesitation that caught Fred Parris in the first verse now catches Burch. He double-pumps on “When,” letting the word fragment into two parts, and then rushes across the line, letting it shudder through him. He puts everything he has into the four words of the line, and it sweeps him up. “I could hear you say”—but he never says what she said. Maybe he was too consumed by the moment to hear more than the sound of her voice.
The way Burch puts an event into the song— you kissed me —something physical, intimate, irreducible—is shocking. Suddenly this is not just a song. Someone is telling you what happened to him, and you believe him—as pain floods over him, you have to believe him. The girl in the song is present, and he is not just sitting in his room, dreaming ofwhat almost happened, something he wants so much he can almost believe it did happen: “Oh I couldn’t sleep / For on my mind / Was the image / Of a girl / I hope to find,” as the Safaris put it in 1960, embarrassing a good part of the nation as they did so. When you kissed me —it’s a moment that can’t be taken back. “What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me,” Geeshie Wiley sang in 1930 in “Last Kind Words Blues”; that’s where, that day in Austin, life found Don Burch, or the person he was able to become when he sang “In the Still of the Nite.”
A half-century after that afternoon rehearsal, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece titled “Should Bob Dylan Retire?” “When to Leave the Stage,” ran the subhead: “A generation of music icons is hitting retirement age, along with their baby boomer fans. Is it time for Bob Dylan to hang up his hat and harmonica?” “The issue of whether Mr. Dylan should pack it in has been an enduring parlor game in music circles,” John Jurgensen wrote. “Most alarming to listeners devoted to his seminal recordings: the state of Mr. Dylan’s voice, decades on from its first signs of deterioration. Dr. Lee Akst, director of the Johns Hopkins Voice Center, says it’s impossible to diagnose Mr. Dylan without examination, but . . . ” Illustrating the piece was a remake of the cover of Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, with the singer and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo hugging his arm as they walkedthrough the snow on a New York street, shining with the pleasure of being in the right place at the right time, embodying youth, love, sex, freedom, and possibility, and so fully that the single block of Jones Street in Greenwich Village in 1963 could open onto every highway and back road in the United States. But now you saw a man and woman from behind. He was heavy and his hair was white; she leaned into him as before, thick and stooped, holding onto her walker in the slick of slush on the pavement. The story was bizarre from its premise: the notion that it was up to the public to decide when Bob Dylan or anybody else should “leave the stage”—which really meant shut up, or die. The subtext was the presentation of age as a
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