GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: The Dead and Metallica, Nov. 9 2017

I’m always looking for shows to write about, but when I first heard about Band Together, the Nov. 9th Benefit for North Bay Fire Relief at AT & T Park, I was a little bit dismayed. You probably couldn’t find a bunch of bands more emblematic of my early years covering rock for major magazines than the acts they announced as headliners, and not only that, but they were each emblematic in an entirely different way. I spent many years as literal Dead-hater in chief in this country; I spent one summer (1996) covering the Lollapalooza tour when Metallica was headliner, and as for Rancid, those darling little indie punk rock anti-capitalists, they are my spirit animal. In my tiny mind, those three groups are like chalk, cheese and chocolate… bearing in mind that I am a person who truly hates cheese.

 I could hardly get my head around going to a show like that, it was so vastly portentous of my past, while simultaneously pointing out the way that all popular music, once spiky with difference, has lately flattened into this gushy brown sludge. But when push came to shove, I had to admit the whole project was a pretty impressive, especially given that it was only thrown together in the last few weeks, since fires devastated a region of the Bay Area. The swiftness and surety of the way it came together was reminiscent of some equally variety-packed BGP (Bill Graham Presents) fundraisers, like one right after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 that featured John Fogerty, Bonnie Raitt, Tower of Power, Big Brother, the Dinosaurs, Pete Escovedo Orchestra, Taj Majal, Bobby McFerrin, Bob Hope (!!!) and, at separate locations, the Grateful Dead and Los Lobos.

So, whatever one thought about the Band Together lineup, there was no doubt it was in keeping with the old spirit of San Francisco music scene: putting on shows like this is what we do best here. And it was historical in another way, too, in that it was a throwback to the mid-1980s Band Aid type blockbuster fundraiser, though its goals and proceeds are (one hopes) more targeted and successful. Band Together was organized, sponsored, or otherwise kickstarted by the ubiquitous Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, by Live Nation, Another Planet Entertainment, Google, the SF Giants, and by The Tipping Point Emergency Relief Fund, the organization it was benefiting. According to the website, 100% of ticket sales were going to the charity; throughout the concert there were constant calls for online/texted donations, and it had, by concert time, raised seventeen million dollars, which is no small chunk of change.(You can still donate, by the way, by clicking here.)

the dream state of capitalism

Band Together’s goals are entirely laudable – that’s why I threw my money at it -- but even so, I don’t think it’s exactly a coincidence that we’re seeing a resurgence of this type of thing, since the Band Aid era was during high Reagan years, when the Republican mantra was also all about cutting government spending and taxes. Today we live in under a similarly tightfisted regime, wherein GoFundMe campaigns have become a reasonable business model, even, alas, a form of healthcare and debt relief, so my prediction is that we will begin seeing a ton more of this type of concert. And that is only one of the ways that this whole show seemed symptomatic of the very different world we live in now that I am not a rock critic. As I said, to my hidebound mind, set in stone some half century ago, these bands simply don’t belong together on one bill, especially not alongside the inexplicably popular Dave Matthews, white rapper G Eazy and Raphael Saadiq, and the fact that the crowd would welcome all three with equal fervor is just indicative of the cataclysmic changes wrought in our listening habits since the advent of the iPod Shuffle.

Those changes didn’t happen in my soul, though, so for a while I didn’t want to go. It was for a great cause and easy for me to get to, but it was on a work day, smack dab in the middle of the Dreamforce convention, plus, the forecast said it was going to rain. But my brother, who is a world renowned expert on the Grateful Dead, said, “Oh, it never rains on the Grateful Dead in the Bay Area. It’s a known thing.”

And he was right. Despite the forecast, it cleared up that afternoon. So come 7 o clock, after my class got out, I found myself heading down there in a Lyft. The intersections near the park were so packed they looked like Shibuya in Tokyo, and I had to hop out of the car a few blocks early, shouldering my way down to Willie Mays Plaza. All around me, people were selling ticket downloads, and saucy street sausages, and edible weed items, and bootleg Band Together t-shirts. Thick clouds of pot smoke wafted over my head, and the lights of the Bay Bridge winked out to my left. I felt like I had stepped into Bladerunner 2049, only with everyone on the set looking worse, and worsely dressed. The thought made my heart lift, because I am happiest at shows where I think I’m going to learn something, and this seemed like it would be educational in some undefined way.

when the lights go down on the bla bla bla

Sadly, by the time I got to the ballpark, I had to miss Rancid, the only band I like, as well as the pleasantly poppy G Eazy, who I am told took a moment to curse out Donald Trump, arriving instead during the dreadful Dave Matthews Band. God, I forgot how insufferable his music is. Usually I like to cover concerts by sitting alone and walking around and taking notes and texting my brother, but Dave Matthews is so unbearable that I went and bothered my Millenial friend Emily in the club section, who was there on a second date. I know that’s not very nice of me – especially as Emily and I immediately started plaguing the poor fellow with pictures of our recent trip to Budapest – but it was preferable to actually listening.

Meanwhile, Emily and her date were getting the feels because they listened to DMB in high school, i.e. fourteen years ago. I asked them if they liked the Grateful Dead. The date said, “Well...I listen to Bill Walton’s  podcast, and he told a funny story about them.”

Emily: “I don’t like them, but I like John Mayer.”

Date:  “Well, that’s random.”

Us: “No it’s not.”

Him: “?????”

SURPRISE! John plays Jim!

Just then, the band comes on stage, led by none other than John Mayer. Date loses his shit, along with the people behind us, who also were not expecting it (because, really, nobody expects John Mayer, just like nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition). By contrast, Emily, upon hearing some of the not-Dead’s music, immediately loses interest in John Mayer. That’s my girl! Not really, I’m just kidding. What she said was, “this is perfectly pleasant, but it sounds like background muzac.”

Meanwhile, I tweet, “The Dead are the kind of band who wear their own t-shirts on stage.” Instantly, a kind follower tweets back nervously: “Is this going to be like the time you trashed Jimmy Buffett?” Right, I think. That article reaped death threats, rape threats…and that was before the invention of twitter. I decide to calm down a little.

Presently, I looked over, and see that Emily is adding a picture to her Snapchat story. “John plays Jim,” she captions it.

“You mean, John plays Jerry,” I say.

 “Oh right,” she says, correcting it. “Is that with a J or a G?”

Obviously, I am well aware that Dead and Co. are not the Grateful Dead. At this point, I am just going to let my brother do the honors:

Dead And Company arose after the success of Fare Thee Well shows. Phil Lesh had had it with the drummers, but Bob Weir, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart went on tour in Fall 2015. John Mayer first heard the Grateful Dead in 2001. Jeff Chimenti (keyboards) and Oteil Burbridge (bass) are veterans of these sort of bands. Chimenti has played with Weir and various offshoots since 1996, and he isn't dead (they regularly joke about this in interviews, since Dead keyboardists have a Spinal Tap like history). Oteil Burbridge played with the Allman Brothers for 20 years or so (1996-2015)

Most Deadheads think Dead And Co are alright, but not epic. This show was three days before their next tour kicks off at Madison Square Garden, and of course they didn't rehearse, and it showed (keep in mind, Jerry wouldn't have rehearsed either). The consensus of my serious old Deadhead friends who watched the stream said they played badly (and these are people who like them). There was some question of the propriety of playing a song called "Fire On The Mountain" to people who lived in the mountains and lost their home to a fire. 

Bob Weir

To me, it was just weird hearing the Dead’s music again. I range it alongside other scourges of my youth, that is, the many all American things Everyone Else But Me Likes: McDonald’s, Apple stuff, Disneyland, beer. On the one hand, I can understand what’s enjoyable about the continuous loop of pingy little guitar notes, the lyrics about almost nothing, the two drummers, and the aural miasma of, for lack of a better word, Deadishness that descends on this type of gathering, yet something about it always makes me feel outcast and uncomfortable.

Meanwhile, behind us, a group of fat men in tye-dye rose up as one and noodle danced for the duration, possibly for the first time in two decades. Emily was slightly aghast. I tried to explain what the whole Dead crowd, the Dead thing, was about to her but it just wasn’t possible. People today think the Dead are just another band who toured a lot in the 1980s and 90s. Like Rolling Stone magazine, they know it existed as a historical thing, but it’s difficult to convey the phenomenon; the masses of hippie-vans parked along the Panhandle, the kids wandering up Haight street begging for a miracle, the misguided conversations with people telling one how transcendent the Dead’s music is…it all comes flooding back as I listen to John Mayer and Co.  noodling away at endless songs that I thought I would never be subjected to again. At the end, Emily said doubtfully, “Well, I do like it when bands are obviously just playing for themselves,” and I do too. But the music still makes me yawn.

All benefits must by rights spend some interim time praying and praising, and this one was no exception. In this case the honorees were for first responders and fire victims, who had a special section to themselves and were given on screen shout-outs by celebrities like Huey Lewis and Tony Bennett and in person, Buster Posey and Barry Bonds. Then, after a brief break, Metallica come on. As noted above, many years ago I spent part of one whole summer on the road with them, but this is me at a Metallica gig: onstage for first song, taking notes, notes, notes; fourth song, I go down under the risers and run as fast as I can to the bus, get in the bus and cover my ears, because that’s when the pyro begins, and pyro makes me cry. After an interval, I come back up until the finale, then, as the set finishes, curl up in a ball with my head wrapped up in the nearest towel.

I tell Emily this, and she points out that they won’t be doing any pyro at this show, because it’s a benefit for fire victims and we’ve just spent the last three hours seeing between set videos of people talking about the problems of FIRE. She says that even the Warriors didn’t use pyro, out of respect, in the last few weeks. “Well, seeing Metallica without pyro isn’t right,” I say piously, even though I hate pyro. This is how wedded I am to my past.

Emily asks, “Will I like Metallica?”

“Well…they’re very dramatic,” I say doubtfully. But she might: Emily used to be a classical violinist, and Metallica do have a certain musicality; it’s hard to deny that Hammett and Hetfield are super musical, even if the use they put it their talent is making massive speed-runs up and down their guitar necks, and adding tuneless shouting to a swift, staccato, martial beat. And I don’t know why, maybe just because the Dead's sound is so spineless, but I am a little excited to hear it again. It takes me back.  Certainly everyone else in the crowd is revving up for it too – the fat guys in the Dead shirts, the tattooed dudes in Misfits shirts, the men with their sons on their shoulders, the Dave Matthews fan in front of me wiggling her hips...we’re all kind of making this little Metallica-is-coming roar in our heads. 

And Metallica doesn’t disappoint. They come on and fucking POUND it. Sing goddamn, I think; sing off to never-never land. Pound it, brothers, POUND POUND POUND. This is not your background music. This is music for the ages, if the ages had taken place on one chromatic scale, entirely in major chords and only in four-four time.

Down in the field, a pit forms, and Emily looks at it in dismay. “Why are all those people doing Ring Around the Rosie?”

Me, sighing. “If you don’t know, I can’t explain.”

Yes, words fail. I left on Metallica’s fifth song, because I didn’t want to miss the train home and because – pyro excepted -- they hadn’t appreciably changed since I last saw them 21 years ago. I’ve changed though, and here’s how: now, instead of being infuriated on a Jimmy Buffett level by the old Dead Heads swirling around above me and the slightly less old pony-boys hurling each other around in the mosh pit, I sent out waves of love and respect to them all. I love them for still loving their beloved music, whatever it is, and for giving money to a good cause, and for braving the crowds of Dreamforce to come out in the maybe-rain, and, simply, for staying true. 

Be honest, stay true – that’s my motto. The new world is very different for sure, but the new me is definitely better than the old one. The new me doesn’t have to stay to the end of the show or stand on stage during Metallica with my head in wrapped in a Rancid sweatshirt, or get the songs right or even tell you what to think. The new me says goodbye to all that. And good riddance, too.

 One more time: to donate to Tipping Point click here.

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.