Once Upon A Time You Dressed So Fine

One night last week I took my Media Studies class on a field trip to see the opening night of the San Francisco Film Festival’s Doc Stories at the Castro Theater. As befits an opening, the theater was all lit up, and nicely dressed people were flooding in, but my students, aged 19 to 22, were the youngest people by some thirty to fifty years so they rushed to the candy counter and bought popcorn before they sat down – all of them, I noted, near the aisles, in case they wanted to bail. Then they stared somewhat uncomprehendingly at the organist, who rises up and plays during the pre-show interlude, and giggled. To them, I fear, the Wurlitzer and its music were of the same era, and equally schmaltzy, as the subject of the film, which was the magazine Rolling Stone.

photo by Emily Marcus

Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge is a new documentary that will run on HBO on Nov. 6^th and 7^th by filmmakers Alex Gibney and Blair Foster; it is funded and sponsored by Rolling Stone magazine itself. (Note: the documentary is in two parts; we only saw only part 1.) It comes hard on the heels of Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, the new biography of Jann Wenner by Joe Hagan, which apparently is surprisingly critical of its subject: according to the New York Times, Wenner was so angered by his portrayal, he pulled out of planned book tours and called the finished book something “deeply flawed and tawdry, rather than substantial.”

Of course, this so-called ‘controversy’ has only helped the book’s overall profile and sales, and surely indicates a far better book than one might expect. Rolling Stone, the documentary, is it’s opposite, a fawning hagiography, much more what Mr. Wenner probably intended as his legacy. And while it is nonetheless enjoyable to watch and probably, in many ways, very accurate – Rolling Stone DID scoop the main stream press on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, it did create a venue for new journalism, it did observe, mirror, and chronicle the vast cultural changes of the 1960s, the irony of watching this movie in this era of fake news and constant self-promotion was truly vexing. I would definitely recommend watching it anyway, for its great footage of Tina Turner, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Hunter S. Thompson, but as a teaching tool, it worked only in a negative fashion. When the lights came up, I noted that, as expected, all but one of the kids had bailed.

The thing is, there is much that my students cannot know about Rolling Stone – a back story that is too complex to add to any film. Some of the back story here is great – I enjoyed Greil Marcus’s description of Mario Savio’s arrest at a UC Berkeley free speech rally, though it’s buried at the end of the film for some reason – but you have to bring a lot of knowledge to that. Plus, it’s different watching footage of a very early Bruce Springsteen show (prefiguring the ‘I saw the future of rock ‘n’ roll…’ remark) having been there (that is, at a show very like it); to paraphrase Greil himself, it was performances like those that both saved my life and broke my heart.

This era Bruce.

It’s different, too, knowing the fates of some of the writers and of the magazine itself. In one scene, Cameron Crowe talked about a piece he wrote on Led Zeppelin, which Jann Wenner later criticized to his face for being too deprecatory; for saying exactly what the band wanted to hear. Crowe praises him for his editorial acumen, but you can only wonder then, where did it go? It’s sort of heartbreaking comment, in light of subsequent events: not just this film, and not just Wenner’s anger at his biographer for NOT saying what he wanted to hear, but the whole descent of Rolling Stone magazine; the descent of journalism itself. Are they all just tools of the machine now? It would seem so.

scene from almost famous: not crow, not bangs

Rolling Stone has recently been put up for sale, presumably it will go to a media conglomerate, a move which will no doubt change it, though probably not that much, since it has long just been a vehicle for big stars and movies and Hollywood in general. In some ways, Rolling Stone has been a victim of the internet, but not entirely, it was also a victim of its own world view.

What the film gets right – and my students don’t know – is just how meaningful it was for so many years. I cannot even stress how much mileage I personally have gotten out of having “written for” Rolling Stone. I never wrote a feature for them – those were almost all assigned in-house – but I did a lot of record and live reviews, and people really respect that, even now. I’ve written way more and better stuff for other places, but at job interviews, no one looks at my CV and says, “Wow, you wrote for Spin?” Incidentally, watching the film made me think a little bit about that. You know how I got assignments in the days before email? I called them on the phone. Obviously, it’s easy for editors to not take a call from a writer they don’t want to hear from. So getting them to take your call involved meeting those people in the real world and schmoozing them, generally at CMJ or SXSW, and that, as you can imagine, has its perils.

In other words, the race wasn’t always to the fittest, it was to the boldest – yet another reason why women’s bylines appear so infrequently. In my day, the early 1990s, you could count on one hand the names of women who appeared in Rolling Stone in the reviews section. And have a few fingers left.

I want to emphasize here that at the time, I didn’t think that was weird. It never really occurred to me that we, women, as a class, were oppressed: my male editors, Anthony and Will, were great guys; I liked them, and nothing bad or abusive ever happened to me there. (#notme #notthere.) But the thing is, in that era, I did not have the language or the tools to understand how I was being marginalized anyway. The film Rolling Stone really helped me understand why that was, because the film does it too. A simple example: at the start of the film, it acknowledges that the magazine was begun by Jann Wenner and his wife Jane, who brought much of the money to it; it also says she worked extremely hard, though it doesn’t say at what (ad sales, probably). But she’s never mentioned again in the film – not until, in the Q and A after the screening, her son Gus, said, “the magazine founded by my father and mother.” (My italics.)

Next, early on, the film devotes an enormous and really pretty salacious segment to groupies, including explicit sex scenes, plaster casters, etc. From the cinematic point of view, it’s very true to Rolling Stone's ethos – that women were objects, groupies, fun and funny, ‘stylish’ etc. But if that’s what women are regarded as within their hermetic world, you can see exactly why women as critics weren’t encouraged or welcomed, and why women like me, who desperately wanted to be that, felt weird and other around the whole scene.  If you’re supposed to be giving blowjobs, you certainly aren’t also supposed to be also  saying things like, “Hmmm, that song sounds incredibly similar to “Pale Blue Eyes.” At least that was always my experience. Looking back, trying to navigate that milieu as a woman was hard and confusing. It took a huge emotional toll on me.

Plastercasting. Duh.

The film gives a little bit of love to Tina Turner, though Yoko Ono is practically ignored in favor of John Lennon (after all, she’s just his wife). Otherwise, the female world of Rolling Stone is represented entirely by Annie Leibovitz. As I said, the film is brutally true to what it was like there, but it would have been nice if they’d acknowledged that as problematic: by not doing so, the kids in my class just dismissed it – the magazine, that is, which they don’t worship in the same way and now never will -- as old fashioned and sort of full of shit. Anyway, they’re good Media Studies students, and they know self promotion when they see it.

All this aside, I would not dismiss this film entirely. I would even recommend watching it when it comes out on HBO if you are interested in media, magazines, and especially in the cultural history of the 1960s and 1970s. Although it is not an objective document, the filmmakers made some great choices of how to illustrate the making of a magazine. One great choice was having actual stories themselves, the prose, read aloud over footage of the artists they are discussing. Another was using the actual taped recordings of the interviewees over the text – so you hear the transcript of  John Lennon’s interview, being spoken…by John Lennon.  It’s riveting. The sequence on Hunter S. Thompson (read by Johnny Depp) is especially good, and reminded me of reading “Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail” with my class at Evergreen last year; re-reading, or maybe a better way of putting it is re-swallowing, his outraged  tirade against Richard Nixon and Republican political machine just after that election of you know who was so pointed and poignant that it helped us all work through hard times. 

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail was originally published in Rolling Stone as a monthly feature, and even today it stands out as a unique and fearless document: not only does it commend Rolling Stone for sticking with it, but it entirely convinces one of the merits of subjectivity as a journalistic tool. It’s a great moment in the form, but as we all know now, it ends in tragedy. As does Rolling Stone, I think. As does Rolling Stone.  

Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge airs on HBO on Nov. 6 and 7.

Sticky Fingers: the Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine by Joe Hagan, is available in bookstores everywhere.

My Life With My Life And The Thrill Kill Kult

It was Manafort Monday and the day before Halloween. What better band to spend it with than My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult? 

All day, I had been going around humming a little tune, checking twitter occasionally to see if anyone else was being indicted, thinking lovely thoughts about come uppances and revenge and retribution, just the kind of stuff that industrial electro-pop grindcore audifies.* In the shops, people were dressed up a little bit, as zombies and ghouls and as real people with blood on their faces, it was like being on the set for a video for a song by the Cramps. Later, as I got ready to go out in my thigh high boots (JUST KIDDING!) I played a bit of “Sex on Wheelz” as a warmup and my daughter poked her head in my room.

“Are you playing video games?”

Me: “???”

Her: “This sounds exactly like the music they play in Borderlands when a villain pops up. “

Borderlands, it seems, is a video game which purports to take place in another universe where everyone lives on a planet run by crime lords (known as bosses), and every boss has it’s own theme music, much like how baseball players get to choose a song to play while they’re walking up to the batters box. The bosses pop up now and again, anticipated by cuts from bands very much influenced by TTKK. In fact, video games in general seem to have been influenced by this band: in 1998, there was even one called Thrill Kill that didn’t get released because it was so violent. This struck me as an especially perfect metaphor on Manafort Monday, since in a way he’s like a real life crime lord (though as a matter of fact probably the music that plays when he walks in the room is by Frank Sinatra…or that perp-y opening theme from “Dragnet.” So if you think about it in the right light, who DOESN’T want to see TTKK on the night before Halloween?  

Sadly, the literal answer to that rhetorical question is: everyone in the Silicon Valley. It wasn’t TTKKs fault, really: it was sort of the fault of San Jose. That place has been a bad location for live music for years and years, and I should know, as I was the second string rock critic for the San Jose paper the Mercury News for a while. Mostly I covered shed shows at nearby Shoreline or arena shows, although I do recall a few weird outlying events like seeing  Ted Nugent  at the Civic Center (where my brother, eyeing a guy who was dressed only in a leopard print loin cloth and those Thor sandals that lace up around your calves,  made one of the all-time funniest remarks of my working life when he asked wonderingly, “but where does he keep his car keys?” or the Screaming Trees at some short-lived club or other right near here where a guy called me and Isabelle “embarrassing women” to our faces, because one of us had said something indicating we knew the name of the label, the bass player, and  opening act, and had possibly even heard of Black Sabbath.

In short, there is just something very un-rock ‘n’ roll about San Jose, and this had never been truer than on last Monday night. As I drove through the deserted streets – and I DO mean deserted -- I noticed a bunch of people in turquoise Sharks jerseys walking away from the SAP Center. They were not walking towards the Ritz, to top off their festivities with a little anti-religious/pro-satanic, psychedelic electro punk, that’s for sure. After about the third couple walked by dressed identically, it occurred to me that an ice hockey jersey, though exceedingly unflattering to almost everyone, would be good Halloween costume, and how odd it was that none of these people were intending it thusly.

What makes a town a good rock town, anyway? My brother, who writes a whole blog on this topic, says it has to do with cheap real estate, but if that were the case, the San Jose would be far, far more of a hot spot. It’s really very strange, there is a university just a few blocks away from downtown, lots of good restaurants and bars, all kinds of things you’d want in a city…but from a music perspective, the place just perennially languishes, and this was a case in point: poor MTWTTKK were playing to a half full house – and ‘half’ is probably throwing roses at it. It wasn’t quite a bad enough house to make me say they were playing only to me; there was a hefty cheer after every song from “I See Good Spirits and I See Bad Spirits” and “Confessions of a Knife,” but there was a giant gaping empty space on the floor that could not have looked good from the stage, and the band itself looked kind of shock-faced; like it was very professionally going through the motions. It made me feel bad for them, and I hate feeling bad for bands.  

I mean, you know the scene in “The Crow” where Brandon Lee gets all badass during a Thrill Kill Kult performance in a warehouse, and people are all throwing themselves off the stage and stuff? This show wasn’t at all like that. Also, the show only cost $13 to get in – one dollar less than it cost to see “Blade Runner 2049” at the-good-cineplex-with-the-seats-you-lie-down-in – but that also made me sad. I used to have a moderate liking for this kind of industrial-disco-grindcore: seeing Ministry charm an Akron audience into quite literally destroying the arena during a driving rainstorm is one of the signature rock critic moments of my life, as was, in a slightly different way, the time Al Jourgensen shook a devil-horned fist at me when I accidentally cut him off on an on-ramp to MOPAC in Austin. TTKK’s shtick, with its anti-religious costumes and sex stuff, is way more campy than that, but they too were groundbreaking in their way, and I like that song “Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness,” (although “do as you’re told with the weapons of the world” has a more ominous sound to it than it did when I first heard it.)

As the ‘Ks’ indicate, My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult aren’t as hardcore as Ministry: their iconography is much more rooted in that latex-and-lace 70s L.A. aesthetic, with a soupcon of horror film/serial killer chic laid on for good measure; their  music is essentially a loud fast drone or chant overlaid with sampled snippets of b-movies over a very industrial-strength rhythm. It's really a studio concoction, which is why its live act changes each tour: in this incarnation, besides its two eternal main men (“Groovie Mann” and “Buzz McCoy”) and a young drummer, there were two women with identical Bettie Page haircuts, one a cool-as-hell bassist, Mimi Star, and the other ("Bomb Gang Girl") who stood stock still and did a zombie- robot dance the entire time. Later, someone asked me if the show made my ears bleed, and the answer was, no – and that’s actually problematic, because this kind of stuff doesn’t sound good unless it really makes your bones shake. Plus, a band without a guitarist, while an admirable idea, means that the key never changes, and monotony ensues. However grindy and electric the machines and the keyboards get, you end up thinking, ‘this would be a lot more tolerable to a person on speed.’ And there’s just no way that anyone is going to be on speed on a Monday night in San Jose, although to their eternal credit, there were two ladies clad in semi-obscene Marie Antoinette wear.

But it’s hard to be alone in spirit like that, and they didn’t quite overcome my ennui with the whole thing. Indeed, I left feeling disgusted that I had even gone  out; wishing instead that I had stayed home to finish Laurent Binet’s book “The 7th Function ofLanguage,” which has one very interesting gloss on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘desiring production,’ that is, the idea that desire is itself a productive, if mechanistic, force, that drives people (all us ‘desiring machines’) to do things in our social world that fall within the economy of desire; things like going to nightclubs on Mondays to see loud bands who sing songs about fucking and murder.

One interpretation of this idea – supported by recent sex scandals about all those men whose names I don’t want to mention herein -- is that our society’s use of desire is sort of evil, like factories are evil. Sex isn’t just on wheels in D & G, it IS a wheel, or rather an engine, with pistons beating down on life  relentlessly and unemotionally in the most heartless way possible. This is kind of a depressing and unromantic way to look at what is, after all, a life force. But another way forward, when listening to the Thrill Kill Kult, is that the band takes the idea of desire as mechanistic and plays with it. By turning it into an enjoyable audible proposition, they reinsert the pleasure in it – and also remove the fear and dread. You know, like Halloween does. That’s why I feel sad that TTKK didn’t have a good night; I hope that the next night show in SF went a lot better for them.

*(I just made that word up, it’s the audible version of personifies.)