Alone with David Lynch: Notes from a Séance

David Lynch in the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life (2016).

A wise man once told me that mystery is the most essential ingredient of life, for the following reason: mystery creates wonder, which leads to curiosity, which in turn provides the ground for our desire to understand who and what we truly are.

 — “Opening Statement” of “The Archivist,” from The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016), by Mark Frost

Only a few times have I ever felt that being in an audience enhanced my experience of a film. For me art has always been a private thing: “just me and a mirror and my brain,” as The Bee Gees once put it. The obvious benefit of solitary viewing is that you needn’t filter out your neighbors’ responses—contagions of fidgeting whenever action slows or logic separates, gales of laughter at aggressively unfunny jokes. Freed from the bullying influence of consensus, you watch differently; you don’t expect a film to perform for you in the same way. Instead of saying, “Here I am, entertain me,” you adopt the less adversarial, more absorptive role of the engaged bystander. You let the thing develop on its own terms, taking whatever risks it chooses to become whatever it wants to be. Then you judge how well, or if, it did that.

Being the Best: Pop Journalism Comes of Age

Hachette Books, 2022; Hachette Books, 2022.

“How does it feel, to be on your own, a complete unknown, with no direction home . . .” – Bob Dylan

I suppose I’ve always been mystified, in an entertaining way, with our culture’s virtual obsession with the best this and the best that, as if selecting from the taste menu in arts, letters or music actually meant “I’ll have what everyone else is having.”  Maybe it does. Academy Awards, Tony Awards, Nobel Prizes, Grammy Awards, best car, best restaurant, best fashion, best wine, best hotel, and so on forever. Generally, of course, such a designation usually refers to most popular, and nowhere does popularity often equal quality as it does in the rarefied world of pop music. How it could it be otherwise, since the very name says it all? But I’ve never believed that pop meant disposable or frivolous; far from it, since pop, and especially great pop music, is quite often the most accurate gauge of what the French call mentalité, the state of mind of a culture. And pop, at the virtuosic and technically complex level of The Beatles, The Stones, Brian Wilson’s Beach Boys, or The Mamas and the Papas, is obviously an art form demonstrating admirable aesthetics. High-quality pop is invariably a mirror of our reality, regardless of how distorted or clouded by various biases that mirror may be. 

Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: An Interview with Charles Taylor

Author and film critic Charles Taylor. (Photo: Lelia McCabe)

I've long been a fan of 1970s American movies, a time when American cinema mattered and when it was a far cry from the mostly bland, pallid fare on tap in America today. Films from that era – The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Nashville, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Conversation, Carrie, The Sugarland Express, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, The Last Picture Show, Blue Collar, The Landlord and many more – were nuanced, complex, often morally ambiguous, and reflected the breadth and depth of American society and the issues of the day that mattered. And the many talented filmmakers making those movies, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby, Arthur Penn, Peter Bogdanovich and Paul Mazursky, strived both for relevance and for impact but also displayed a sheer excitement in making movies that translated to the screen and the audience's enjoyment of what they were seeing.  For that reason, that thrilling era of moviemaking has also been the subject of a favourite course, American Cinema of the '70s: The Last Golden Age, that I have taught over the years and that I'm constantly tweaking – and, hopefully, improving – with each iteration. When Charles Taylor's superb book Opening Wednesday at a Theater Or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American '70s (Bloomsbury USA) came out in 2017, I was so impressed that I switched things up and made it the subject of one of my classes. 

Dylan in Winter, Part II: Greil Marcus’s Folk Music

Bob Dylan, November 1961. (Photo: Michael Ochs)

I.

Many things matter about Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs (Yale University Press; 273 pp.), Greil Marcus’s fourth—and, he has said, last—book about its subject. But your personal allegiance to Dylan in recent times isn’t one of those things. Whether you particularly value or even like the songs Marcus studies—in order of presentation, “Blowin’ in the Wind” (1962), “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (1964), “Ain’t Talkin’” (2006), “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1964), “Desolation Row” (1965), “Jim Jones” (1992), and “Murder Most Foul” (2020)—also doesn’t matter. The Dylan we surveil in these pages is not the sum of his successes or failures, or of any reader’s likes or dislikes. He is a creative force, a dark, hunched, music-producing presence prowling through decades of celebrity and centuries of history. If you retain a nerve of commitment to anything Dylan has ever done or been, that will be your point of entry, and meanings will flow even from songs you never cared about—songs you may not care about now, except as vehicles for Marcus to do what he does best. 

Cultural Recommendations in this COVID Year

Erik Larson's The Splendid and the Vile was published by Crown Publishers in February. (Photo: Nina Subin)

Pandemic or not, culture continues on. Here are some recommended books, CDs, DVDs and magazines you might want to purchase for the holidays, as presents for others or just to treat yourself.

Primal Pop: Whispering in a Loud Voice

Ol' Blue Eyes. (Photo: Getty Images)

Wait . . . some wag is claiming that both Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were exemplars of primal pop music? How can that be? Two of the most mellow crooners in musical history? But what about John Lennon or Jim Morrison? Oh, them, too, of course. But two of the very first pop stars, astronomical and international singers of pop songs to everyone everywhere – that would be Frank with his 150 million records sold, and Bing with his 100 million – also both touched a deep and hidden place in the soul of their listeners, as diverse as their audiences were, and that is the essence of a primal pop star. They were not only minstrels and troubadours of the highest degree, each with a sense of timing and finesse that captured the tempo of the human heart as never before, but also they both never once complained about being so popular and wished they could have been taken more seriously as artists.

Fake Blues: ABC's Roseanne

Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner in ABC's revival of Roseanne. (Photo: Adam Rose)

One of the truest and weirdest signs of the changing attitudes towards television is the central role that “reboots” of classic shows have taken on in critical discussions of the state of the art. (Everyone is a pop-culture critic now, and that’s truer for TV than it is for most things.) Most of the reboots that have attracted the most attention are of shows from the 1990s, such as The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Full House, and now Roseanne. It’s easy to see why: they’ve been gone long enough to inspire feelings of nostalgia, but are still recent enough that most of the key members of the casts can be tracked down and put back to work without the aid of walkers or jumper cables. (Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 should probably be counted a remake, like the current version of Hawaii Five-O, because its main cast is new, but players from the original version, notably show creator and star Joel Hodgson, have turned up in cameos to give their blessing to the new kids on the block.)

The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

To Gather No Moss: Alex Gibney and Blair Foster's Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge

You're likely to be disappointed by Alex Gibney and Blair Foster's two-part four-hour HBO documentary Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge if you're expecting a thorough exposé that trolls through the pop culture magazine's turbulent fifty-year history. For instance, you won't find much of a nuanced portrait of its boy-wonder founder, editor and publisher, Jann Wenner, when they parse through his struggles with sexuality and drugs. They avoid entirely the paradoxical life of Wenner, whose contradictory impulses – both personally and professionally – came to shape the personality of the magazine for half a century. Since the documentary was made under Wenner's aegis, Gibney and Foster also stay pretty clear of addressing directly the popular perception that Rolling Stone Magazine may have begun as an avatar of the counter-culture in 1968, but eventually it became yet another celebrity journal for aspiring yuppies.Yet even if Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge skirts some of the more complex dimensions built into Jann Wenner, and the turbulent direction the magazine would take in its long history, Gibney and Foster don't whitewash their subject either. “[Rolling Stone is] not just about music, but also the things and attitudes that the music embraces,” wrote Wenner earnestly in an editorial published in the debut issue to define its promise. Yet the film recognizes that promises can't always be kept, especially if the culture itself changes in ways you can't possibly predict. So Rolling Stone is currently up for sale, perhaps recognizing that its potent synergy with popular culture is now gone. In light of this coming event, Rolling Stone: Stories From the Edge decides to look back at some of the key stories the magazine covered over its fifty years, along with the writers who penned them, to see if (despite the changing tenor of the times and the journal that chronicled those changes) they still managed to live up to their promise.

Solitary Woman: Listening to Sinéad O’Connor

(Photo: Donal Moloney/Courtesy of the artist, via NPR)

These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to lay your own grave

— Sinéad O’Connor,
“Black Boys on Mopeds”

I’ve seldom experienced so profound a silence as the one heard on the night of October 3, 1992, just after Sinéad O’Connor, appearing as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, tore up a photograph of Pope John Paul II. It was her second spot of the show; there was no band around her, only candles burning on a stool. She began a song which many recognized and many didn’t as Bob Marley’s “War,” itself a Haile Selassie speech set to music. The performance, while gripping, was also strident and dull. The song went on, first crawling then flying then crawling, as fiery and ponderous as a dragon. The drama, if it was that, lay in the way the singer’s eyes seemed to both ice over and flare up as she neared the climax. She knew what she was going to do.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXIV

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers (photo by Mary Ellen Matthews)

I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted my love of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. While I have collected and enjoyed Petty’s music for years, I’ve never taken the time to contemplate why his best songs (and there are many) have always brought me such happiness. But for the last 40 years, Petty and The Heartbreakers helped keep some of the idealistic dreams of the sixties alive. They didn’t, however, do it by showing a nostalgic reverence for the era and its music. Rather they captured the music’s urgency, its uncompromising demand for freedom which lies right at the heart of all rock & roll. Whether it’s in an anthem like “I Won’t Back Down,” a plaintive ballad like “Southern Accents,” or a scorching rocker like “You Wreck Me,” Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers created an immediacy that made each song sound both fresh and fully alive with possibility. For those who remember the joy they felt when a great song came through their tiny earphone on their transistor radio, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers brought that instant delight to the music they played. I think critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine nailed Petty’s appeal and longevity perfectly when he said that he and The Heartbreakers "didn’t break from tradition the way their punk contemporaries did. Instead, they celebrated it, culling the best parts of The British Invasion, American garage rock, and Dylanesque singer/songwriters to create a distinctly American hybrid that recalled the past without being indebted to it.”

Bridge Over Troubled Water: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe"

Throughout the early sixties, tragic teen ballads – beguiling and haunting mini-operas cured in the melodrama of adolescent angst – dominated the charts. Most were extravagant tales of woe and heartbreak like The Shangri-Las' "Leader of the Pack," where the rejected biker/lover dies proudly on his wheels, while others included Frank J. Wilson's "Last Kiss," where Frank's girl dies not-so-proudly because of her boyfriend's faulty wheels. Other earlier sagas of loss were downright perverse. Mark Dinning's 1960 hit "Teen Angel" got the sixties off to a fiendishly grim start. His bizarre story concerns the singer's girlfriend, who gets leveled by a train after she rushes back to her stalled car to rescue her high school ring. (Perhaps today you'd have to substitute a cell phone for the prized jewelry.) And if "Teen Angel" weren't already more than enough, Johnny "Mr. Bass Man" Cymbal came along that same year with "The Water is Red," where the singer's girl gets torn apart by a shark while swimming at the beach. The boyfriend, with chivalry as his shield, bravely wades through the bloodied waters, not to just gather up her torn remains, but to take on (with his pocketknife, no less) this early relative of Jaws. By the jaded seventies, then, it was no surprise that Randy Newman parodied, with expert precision, this strangely popular genre in "Lucinda." Drawing from the slow blues style of Ray Charles, he tells us of a woman who accidentally gets chewed up by a beach-cleaning machine. Lying in the sand in her graduation gown with some boy she just met that night, Lucinda seems to have fallen asleep just as the mechanical contraption started chugging along. Her companion tries vainly to wake her up, but it's to no avail: Lucinda is doomed to lie under the sand. (Given her fate, and the style of the song, Newman may also be parodying murder blues ballads such as "Sleeping in the Ground.") Later in the decade, Warren Zevon went Newman's macabre tale one better with his hilarious satire "Excitable Boy," revisiting the song as if the narrator might be Ted Bundy (and he's backed with affirmative "ooh-wah-ooh's" by Linda Ronstadt and Jennifer Warnes in the manner of gregarious high school cheerleaders ). 

If these tragic pop dramas of the past were always bathed in tears (linking them in a significant way to the romantic heartbreak heard in fifties doo-wop), there was one popular tragic song in the summer of 1967 that drew from different sources, avoiding melodrama altogether and casting a spell on listeners for decades. Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was a quiet Southern Gothic ballad about suicide and other mundane matters of the day which get shared over the dinner table with the biscuits and peas. Where "Leader of the Pack," "Teen Angel" and "Last Kiss" could have been ripped from the headlines of city tabloids, "Ode to Billie Joe" was as cryptic and mysterious as an old Appalachian murder ballad. What made it even more curious was that the summer of 1967 was hardly a quiet one. Some were celebrating a Summer of Love with the Monterey Pop Festival, but in his book, The Old, Weird America, Greil Marcus (in discussing "Ode to Billie Joe") reminds readers that a number of calamitous events were taking place that summer besides growing flowers in your hair and heading west. Fifty years ago today, the day after Gentry recorded her single, twenty-six black citizens were killed in protests in Newark, New Jersey. Detroit almost doubled that number two weeks later. Arthur Penn started a revolution in American movies with the premiere of Bonnie and Clyde, a picture about two Depression-era bank robbers that implicated us in the murders we watched on screen.

America Thinks and Goes Home: The 50th Anniversary of Frank Zappa's Absolutely Free

While much of the pop music world today is celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a few months before that landmark album made its way onto our turntables, Frank Zappa's second album, the rock oratorio Absolutely Free, was already sending up the culture wars with the irreverent verve and zeal of Spike Jones. Of course, it didn't draw anywhere near the attention of Pepper and no one is celebrating its 50th anniversary despite its daring and ribaldry. If Freak Out! (1966) announced the arrival of The Mothers of Invention and their subversive intentions (as well as influencing Sgt. Pepper), Absolutely Free was the fulfillment of those ambitions. On the inside cover of Freak Out!, Frank Zappa listed all those who had an impact on his work. But it’s on Absolutely Free that you can actually hear the presence of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, Lenny Bruce, and Edgard Varèse. Freak Out! was a beautifully designed map for The Mothers’ music, while Absolutely Free actually takes you places. Critic Greil Marcus wrote, in Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, that “on this early effort the wit was liberating, the noise of the band not merely Absurdist but actually absurd. . . .”

Absolutely Free was indeed an oratorio of ridiculous extremes – performed at breakneck speed – with a tangy political satire woven into a musical embroidery. The history of 20th century music, from Stravinsky to The Supremes, happily plays bumper cars and lives up to the title of the record. No genre gets excluded – or not satirized. “We play the new free music – music as absolutely free, unencumbered by American cultural suppression,” Zappa announced. “We are systematically trying to do away with the creative roadblocks that our helpful American educational system has installed to make sure nothing creative leaks through to mass audiences. . . . The same patriotic feeling expressed in songs like ‘The Green Beret’ and ‘Day of Decision’ are embodied in our every performance, only on a more abstract level. . . .We represent the only true patriotism left.” This abstract example of true patriotism barely leaves you time to catch your breath, and the musical quotes just go whizzing past. And the album’s title turns out to be more than apt. All of Zappa’s musical ideas happily and freely collide in the rush hour traffic.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXII

If there was one songwriter in rock 'n roll who had an endless gift for memorable (and enjoyable) anthems it was Chuck Berry, who died recently in his home at the age of 90. Whether it was his pledge of allegiance in "Rock and Roll Music," his testament to roots in "Back in the U.S.A.," or the happily defiant "Roll Over Beethoven," Berry was the supreme storyteller, rock's Johnny Appleseed, a smooth talker and a smooth walker. Born in St. Louis, Berry drew his musical influences from a variety of genres. The swagger of "You Can't Catch Me" is unthinkable without Louis Jordan. The bravado of "Little Queenie" would have been right at home in the tough urban blues of Muddy Waters. "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" might have been a country music dream imagined by Bob Willis and the Playboys. His lesser-known "Havana Moon" has the swooning balladry of Nat King Cole (and it inspired Richard Berry's "Louie Louie").

All the Criticism That's Fit to Print: Revisiting The Rolling Stone Record Review and The Rolling Stone Record Review II

Led Zeppelin (courtesy of Getty Images).

In March 1969, writer John Mendelsohn was given the assignment for Rolling Stone to review the debut album of Led Zeppelin, a high-octane blues-rock outfit that had just emerged out of the ashes of The Yardbirds – a popular British Invasion band with a string of hits behind them including "Heart Full of Soul" and "For Your Love." Although there were no great expectations that this new ensemble would make history, Mendelsohn's words came to suggest that they might just become history. Chalking up their sound to formula, Mendelsohn remarked that Zeppelin "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better..." Robert Plant's "howled vocals" were described as "prissy" on their cover of Joan Baez's "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," and Mendelsohn went on to add that "[Plant] may be as foppish as Rod Stewart, but he's nowhere near so exciting." Jimmy Page gets complimented as an "extraordinarily proficient blues guitarist," but he's also singled out as "a very limited producer and a writer of weak, unimaginative songs." Criticizing them as wasting their talent on "unworthy material," Mendelsohn saw little from that first record that suggested that Led Zeppelin would be talked about fifty years later. "It would seem that, if they're there to fill the void created by the demise of Cream," he wrote, "they will have to find a producer (and editor) and some material worthy of their collective attention."

A Change Is Gonna Come: The End of the Obama Era

As many of us this week watched President Barack Obama exit the presidential stage with dignity, grace, and even some humour, an inescapable melancholy also permeated the air. Besides the passing of a historic moment in time, one couldn't help but notice the new history about to be made. We were about to watch Donald Trump – a populist demagogue who built his road to the White House by spending years attempting to delegitimize Obama in a Truther campaign that questioned his citizenship – become president. He continued by bullying opponents, toadying up to Russia and hiding his tax returns (which may provide clues to why he plays footsies with Putin), proudly promoting the traits of a sexual predator, exploiting racism and fear, and making promises that pander to anger rather than seeking the means to healing the wounds that stoke that rage. The democratic dream hasn't died and I believe it will survive the man about to be president who has chosen to demean those ideals. But the Obama era, which opened the door to finally laying rest the stained legacy of racism and exploitation, could not close that door on those who sought to ignore it. The idealistic impulse in American exceptionalism is not bathed in light. "America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, lynch mobs and escapes, its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings," critic Greil Marcus writes in The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. "The story of America as told from the beginning is one of self-invention and nationhood." He also reminds us that prophetic voices – from John Winthrop to Martin Luther King Jr. – were "raised to keep faith with the past, or with the future to which the past committed their present." That is also true of the popular culture that reflects that covenant.

Culture for the Holidays: Some Suggestions

The complete four seasons of WKRP in Cincinnati (CBS, 1978-1982) are newly available on DVD.

With the holiday season fast approaching, there is no shortage of books, albums/CDs and DVDs to choose from. So to make it easier for you to pick, here are some recent offerings you might want to contemplate purchasing for your loves ones – or for yourself.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXI

Brian De Palma's Home Movies is a 1979 low-budget independent film made with the help of his film class at Sarah Lawrence as a hands-on training exercise. (They were given the primary responsibilities of raising money, arranging the shooting schedule, and editing the film, all under De Palma's supervision.) What they got was a spirited primal comedy laced with episodes from De Palma's early life that also came to make sense of his movie obsessions. Kirk Douglas (who had just starred in De Palma's last thriller, The Fury) plays a film instructor who uses the medium as a form of therapy. His prize student Dennis Byrd (Keith Gordon) decides to turn the camera on his family life, which is filled with enough neurotic issues to fuel numerous sessions. Besides competing with a favoured and pompous older brother (the hilarious Gerrit Graham, who played the glam rock star, Beef in De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise), Dennis also has to deal with a mother (Mary Davenport) who pops pills because of her philandering husband (Vincent Gardenia), a physician on whom his son ultimately turns his lens to catch him in the act. When his older sibling brings home his girlfriend, Kristina (Nancy Allen), Dennis is immediately drawn to this striking blonde while still torn by guilt over his parents' marital issues. Home Movies is a shaggy satire with Oedipal gags that pop like party balloons. While the picture has a relaxed charm compared to the fervently exciting thrillers, Carrie and The Fury, that preceded it, the themes of voyeurism and fear would carry over effectively into his next picture, Dressed to Kill, where the comedy and horror have a more lasting after-bite.

Things Went Down: Joel Selvin’s Altamont

Things went down we don’t understand, but I think in time we will.

– The Grateful Dead, “New Speedway Boogie”

It’s been 47 years: were The Dead right, wrong, or both? There are different kinds of understanding – factual, emotional, metaphorical – but even combined, they will never add up to any final understanding, any state of Zen, when it comes to certain things. The Altamont concert of December 6, 1969 – the free show that climaxed the Rolling Stones’ autumn tour of the United States – was a day-long cataclysm which the evidence suggests was, for the vast majority in attendance, a uniquely dumb and ugly experience. But it may also have been, as Joel Selvin calls it in the subtitle of his new book, “rock’s darkest day.” It was certainly, as has been pointed out many times, a gruesomely apt metaphor. It illustrated contradictions that were intrinsic to the era, to the people, and to the style of music which brought 300,000 to a racetrack in the windy voids near Livermore, California, to see Santana, The Flying Burrito Brothers, The Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead (who didn’t play), and The Rolling Stones. Like a knife, a metaphor needs its absolute edge, its implacable point. At Altamont, that point was the stabbing, as The Stones played “Under My Thumb,” of Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old from Berkeley who happened to be black and flashing a gun, by Hell’s Angel Alan Passaro, a 22-year-old from San Jose who happened to be white and wielding a knife. Other, mostly unidentified Angels finished the lynching Passaro had begun, and Hunter was dead before the ambulance came. “A young black man murdered in the midst of a white crowd by white thugs as white men played their version of black music”: thus did Greil Marcus summarize the metaphor, the knife point of the event.

Love, Death and Rock & Roll: Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

"Menace is most effective when its limits are not known. [Mick] Jagger's 'demonic' persona was not enhanced by the death at Altamont, as some people have supposed; it was destroyed. In the face of one man's real death, Jagger's 'demonic' posture was shown to be merely perverse."

- George Trow, "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse." The New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.


In his 2012 documentary, Crossfire Hurricane, filmmaker Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) showed how the impudent rebellion of The Rolling Stones' music and their volatile stage performances in the Sixties, which inspired riots everywhere, came from the adolescent impulse to run the table. Unlike The Beatles, who were a still center in a swirling hurricane of love, The Rolling Stones sought out the high winds. They gleefully fanned the flames of discontent until the sweet kick of revolt became a turbulent act of mutiny. But once death greeted them with the passing of co-founder Brian Jones in 1969, and violence and murder answered them at the Altamont Speedway later that same year, the chickens finally came home to roost. From there, it was childhood's end. Their bad boy behavior quickly became a corporate brand of sanctified naughtiness. That branding not only insulated them from the tumult their concerts had created, but it would also rob their music in time of its pulsing vitality. Crossfire Hurricane, taken from the lyrics of their scorching masterpiece, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is in many ways a coming of age story about the taming of artistic danger.

There's also an urgent quest to peel open the riddle behind that artistic danger (and its taming) throughout author and journalist Rich Cohen's (Tough Jews, The Avengers) captivating new book, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), and it coils through the narrative like an electrical current seeking ground. Having been drawn to their music at ten, by an older brother who was exiled to the attic of their parents' home with his music, Cohen would ultimately become a writer and journalist covering The Stones as they toured in the Nineties (right at a time where their music was long passed the potency that once stirred him as an adolescent). Using the subject of time as a key metaphor to parse brilliance from longevity, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (a gift title from Keith Richards who realizes that The Stones have been a constant in this young writer's life) is made up of fan notes that are cured in a quick critical eye. Cohen fully understands how the distance his generation has had from The Stones' greatest moments is both a handicap and a blessing. "Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation," he writes without a trace of bitterness for being born at the wrong time. "Above us, the baby boomers., who consumed every resource and every kind of fun. Below us, the millennials, the children of the baby boomers, who've remade the world into something virtual and cold. The boomers consumed their childhood, then, in a sense, consumed our childhoods, too. They overimbibed, lived to such excess there's nothing left for us but to tell the story." Cohen's story has the power to shrink time so that each song he invokes quickly regains its ability to shock and surprise.