shea stadium. queens, new york. august 15, 1965.
forget the beatles for a minute. seriously. turn around.
they are out there somewhere, four tiny figures on a temporary stage around second base, wearing matching beige jackets and attempting to play rock and roll inside a baseball stadium using technology that appears to have been selected by somebody who had never encountered either a baseball stadium or rock and roll. history has spent sixty years staring at them. john. paul. george. ringo. we have the photographs, the film, the set list, the amplifiers, the guitars, the interviews, the helicopter, the armored truck, the television production, the mythology. every nervous glance and stupid grin has been inspected until the evening feels less like a concert and more like evidence from a particularly noisy crime scene.
fine. the beatles will survive without us for ten minutes.
look at the stands.
55,600 people are sitting, standing, jumping, crying, fainting, waving, screaming, trying to see, trying to hear, trying to get closer, and generally demonstrating that popular music has become considerably larger than almost every piece of infrastructure designed to contain it. bigger than the amplifiers. bigger than the public address system. bigger than the stage. bigger than the assumptions of promoters. and for roughly half an hour, arguably bigger than the beatles themselves.
the audience screams so loudly that the musicians can barely hear the musicians, the audience can barely hear the musicians, and apparently everybody decides this is a perfectly acceptable arrangement.
welcome to stadium rock.
the numbers are ridiculous. 55,600 people. roughly $304,000 in gross receipts. tickets priced between about $4.50 and $5.65. promoter sid bernstein had already brought the beatles to carnegie hall in 1964, but shea was another proposition entirely. this wasn’t a theater. this wasn’t even an arena designed with amplified music somewhere in the architectural vocabulary. this was a baseball stadium, a giant concrete bowl built for watching men throw a ball around, and bernstein was proposing to put the most famous band on earth somewhere in the middle of it.
bernstein reportedly offered the nervous brian epstein $10 for every unsold seat. he wouldn’t need much cash. the tickets disappeared within weeks, and the result became the largest beatles concert yet staged and one of the great demonstrations of how quickly the economics of popular music were mutating.
but 55,600 is one of those numbers that stops meaning anything once you stare at it long enough. stadium crowds become blobs. aerial photographs turn human beings into dots. history writes down attendance and moves along.
so forget 55,600 for a minute.
imagine one fourteen-year-old girl.
she has a ticket. she has probably been thinking about this for weeks or months. maybe she has Beatles photographs taped to a bedroom wall. maybe she knows exactly which Beatle she intends to marry despite some fairly serious logistical problems with that plan. maybe her parents think the whole thing is ridiculous. maybe her friends understand perfectly. she gets to queens. the stadium rises in front of her. a helicopter passes overhead. somebody screams. then everybody screams. another helicopter appears. they scream again.
one attendee, mimi weinberg, later remembered walking around outside shea while girls screamed whenever a helicopter appeared because they were convinced the beatles were aboard. she remembered one girl fainting repeatedly. once the actual concert began, weinberg remembered essentially continuous screaming and said she didn’t properly hear the performance until seeing the concert film much later. what remained most vivid wasn’t musical fidelity. it was the joy.
that distinction matters because we keep asking the wrong question about beatlemania. why would you scream so loudly that you couldn’t hear the band.
maybe because hearing the band wasn’t the only reason you were there.
another Shea attendee, Carol Ihle, later described the experience in almost exactly those terms. the sound systems weren’t good enough. the police were everywhere. fans were trying to get onto the field. the screaming never stopped. her conclusion was essentially that being there was the point.
that’s a much more useful explanation of beatlemania than another paragraph diagnosing teenage hysteria. the audience wasn’t merely receiving a performance. the audience was performing one.
fifty-five thousand people were creating a second event simultaneously with the official event. the beatles performed twelve songs. the crowd performed beatlemania. only one of those performances could be heard properly.
none of this materialized from nowhere. eighteen months earlier, on february 9, 1964, the beatles appeared on the ed sullivan show before an american television audience conventionally estimated at roughly 73 million people. television had placed four musicians into tens of millions of american homes simultaneously. radio repeated the records. magazines supplied photographs. fan clubs supplied belonging. records allowed the songs to be replayed endlessly until every drum fill and vocal harmony became part of somebody’s bedroom furniture.
then promoters took all that accumulated desire and put 55,600 of its owners in one physical location.
of course the building lost its mind.
Shea was partly a concert and partly the moment mass media discovered that it could manufacture an audience larger than existing concert culture knew how to accommodate. the technology of fame had outrun the technology of performance.
and technologically, the whole thing borders on comedy.
modern stadium tours deploy enormous line arrays, digital consoles, in-ear monitors, delay towers, computerized control systems and enough specialized technicians to invade a small country. Shea had 1965. the beatles had powerful-for-the-time Vox amplifiers, but nothing remotely comparable with modern stadium reinforcement. historical accounts describe their equipment working with a stadium public-address system fundamentally intended for announcements rather than defeating tens of thousands of screaming human beings. there were no modern stage-monitor systems feeding each musician a pristine individual mix.
Ringo Starr later remembered the problem with wonderful simplicity. from the first count-in, the screaming overwhelmed everything.
the audience couldn’t hear the beatles. the beatles couldn’t properly hear the beatles. so they watched one another. rhythm became partly visual. keep an eye on ringo. watch the guitars. remember the arrangement. hope everybody reaches the bridge at approximately the same moment. somehow the damn thing continued.
and that technological failure is historically important because it tells us something bigger than the specifications of a Vox amplifier. popular music had become culturally large enough to fill a stadium before concert technology had become technologically competent enough to fill one. the industry discovered the mass rock audience before it figured out what the hell to do with it.
the audience had gotten too big.
rock and roll had outgrown its amplification system.
meanwhile, somebody at shea apparently believed signage might restore civilization. the scoreboard carried a plea asking everyone, for safety’s sake, to remain in their seats.
good luck with that.
fans attempted to reach the field. some climbed barriers. others fainted. police and security personnel spent the evening maintaining the enormous physical separation between audience and performers. contemporary reporting described officers tending to girls close to collapse, while the official Beatles history likewise remembers security dealing with fainting fans and people attempting to reach the stage.
look at the architecture and it tells you everything. the beatles aren’t simply standing on a stage. they are stranded in the middle of a baseball field. the enormous empty space between the musicians and the audience functions like a moat. that distance isn’t an aesthetic decision. it’s crowd control.
fame has become a security problem.
then the beatles arrive in an armored truck because apparently subtlety had died earlier that afternoon. the band traveled by helicopter and entered the stadium in a Wells Fargo armored vehicle accompanied by police. an armored truck. for a pop group. the vehicle ordinarily associated with transporting large quantities of money is now transporting john lennon. the symbolism is almost offensively perfect.
the four musicians are delivered into shea like a highly valuable substance that cannot safely be exposed to the public until deposited in a controlled location. they wait in the umpire’s dressing room. Mal Evans, the Beatles’ road manager and assistant, recorded that despite the enormous screaming already building outside, the group themselves were unusually subdued before the performance. they reportedly sketched their set list onto a discarded baseball scorecard.
outside, 55,600 people.
inside, four guys with a scorecard.
there’s your entire machinery of celebrity in one image.
and now we get to the part music history has never handled particularly well. girls. specifically teenage girls.
popular music criticism has spent decades performing a strange intellectual trick. when men obsess over music, we develop specialized vocabulary to dignify the behavior. collector. historian. audiophile. discographer. crate digger. enthusiast. connoisseur. when teenage girls obsess over music, somebody reaches for hysteria.
the word appears constantly in historical descriptions of beatlemania. contemporary observers were fascinated and frequently disturbed by the screaming. the New York Times report from Shea described the noise in language escalating from enthusiasm toward hysteria and finally pandemonium.
but remove the judgment and look at the behavior. these girls bought records. they requested songs on radio. they bought magazines. they joined fan clubs. they collected photographs. they wrote letters. they memorized biographical minutiae. they attended concerts. they influenced programming. they affected charts. they generated enormous demand. they participated in communities organized around music.
in other words, they behaved suspiciously like serious music fans.
they just didn’t behave like middle-aged male critics believed serious music fans were supposed to behave.
there’s another possibility. maybe screaming wasn’t the absence of musical appreciation. maybe it was a form of participation. the beatles had already been heard privately thousands of times. records were repeatable. radio was ubiquitous. the concert offered something the record couldn’t.
everybody else.
tens of thousands of people experiencing the same obsession simultaneously.
that changes the meaning of the scream. you’re not necessarily screaming at john lennon. you’re screaming beside the person sitting next to you, and she’s screaming beside somebody else, and suddenly 55,600 individual private attachments become publicly visible. one enormous declaration that we are here.
there is power in that, especially for young women growing up in an America where public authority, cultural criticism, media ownership and the music business were overwhelmingly controlled by adults and overwhelmingly controlled by men. for one evening, teenage girls controlled the acoustic environment of a major New York stadium.
nobody else could even hear.
that’s not cultural passivity. that’s an audience discovering its own size.
and this is where the audience stops being merely interesting sociology and becomes part of music history itself. the screaming changed the performance. the beatles couldn’t hear themselves. that affected how they played. the scale changed concert promotion. the scale exposed the inadequacy of contemporary amplification. security requirements changed. economics changed. expectations changed. the relationship between performer and audience changed.
eventually, the Beatles’ relationship with live performance changed too. Ringo later said he often felt people came not to hear the group but simply to see them. the official Beatles chronology presents Shea as a landmark performance acoustically dominated by its audience.
by august 1966, the beatles would stop touring altogether. Shea did not single-handedly cause that decision. touring exhaustion, security fears, controversies, increasingly sophisticated studio work that could not easily be reproduced onstage, and the generally miserable conditions of Beatlemania-era concerts all mattered. history gets stupid when it insists that complicated things happened for one tidy reason.
but the audience was not incidental to the story.
the audience had become so powerful that it was altering the behavior of the band it adored.
and because history enjoys showing off, Shea’s audience wasn’t merely enormous. it contained other pieces of cultural history. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were there and reportedly found the scale and noise remarkable.
but this is precisely where our normal historical instincts betray us. we immediately want to locate the celebrities in the crowd. look. there’s somebody famous. look. there’s somebody who will become famous.
fine.
the more interesting question is what happened to everybody else.
imagine if we could reconstruct even one percent of the Shea audience.
556 people.
where were they from. how old were they. how did they get their tickets. who accompanied them. what did they listen to before the beatles. what did they listen to afterward. did anyone there decide to become a musician. did somebody start a record collection. did somebody buy a guitar the following week. did somebody become an engineer, a promoter, a journalist, a songwriter. did somebody attend Woodstock four years later. did somebody become a Deadhead. did somebody’s musical obsession end the following Tuesday.
all of those outcomes matter.
one teenage attendee, Nancy Andrews, later turned her Beatles fandom into something remarkably literal. she attended both Shea concerts, eventually went looking for the Beatles’ Manhattan office while still in high school, accidentally walked into what she thought was an interview, and wound up being hired to help sort sacks of Beatles fan mail. after graduating in 1968, she joined the organization full-time.
there’s one.
one fan. one seat among 55,600. one individual biography hidden inside the word crowd.
and suddenly the line between audience and music industry disappears.
how many other lines disappeared that night without anybody documenting them.
this is the larger problem with the way popular music history gets preserved. take almost any famous concert photograph and the camera points toward the stage. understandably. that’s where the famous people are. but turn the camera 180 degrees and you’ve got another historical document.
clothes, hair, age, race, gender, class, handmade signs, cameras, security, architecture, consumer culture, technology, social rules. who is allowed into the room. who isn’t. what people do with their bodies when music plays. what they carry. how close they’re willing to stand to strangers. how they respond to particular songs. whether they sit, dance, scream, fight, pray, cry or stare.
that’s not background.
that’s ethnography.
the audience is evidence.
and the story doesn’t begin with Shea. audiences have always shaped music. opera audiences shouted approval and disapproval. dance halls demanded music that worked physically. church congregations participated in sacred repertoire. jazz audiences shaped club culture. teenagers fed jukeboxes. radio listeners called stations. record buyers made charts. dancers helped determine which records survived.
the supposed separation between artist and audience is largely convenient mythology. music is social behavior. somebody makes a sound. somebody else reacts. the reaction changes what happens next.
repeat for several thousand years.
once you start looking through that lens, music history rearranges itself. Deadheads aren’t merely people who liked the Grateful Dead. they’re a traveling information network, an economy, a tape-distribution culture and a social community. Northern Soul isn’t merely a set of records. it’s people traveling across Britain to dance all night to obscure American singles, thereby giving recordings second lives thousands of miles from where they were made. hip-hop isn’t understandable without the crowds around Bronx park jams. punk isn’t understandable without tiny clubs and the people occupying them. disco isn’t understandable without dancers. house isn’t understandable without clubs. techno isn’t understandable without dance floors.
rave isn’t understandable without warehouses, fields, flyers, telephone numbers and people willing to drive somewhere at two in the morning without entirely knowing where the hell they’re going. metal develops tape trading. hip-hop develops mixtape economies. jam-band culture develops concert recording and exchange. the internet develops message boards. Napster turns listeners into distributors. the iPod turns listeners into librarians. streaming turns listeners into data points. social media turns listeners into distribution infrastructure.
every generation invents another way to be an audience.
and that brings us back to the strangest lesson of Shea. a ticket ostensibly purchased approximately half an hour of Beatles music. except many attendees couldn’t hear much of it, and decades later they still describe the evening as extraordinary.
so what did the ticket buy.
proximity. participation. community. spectacle. memory. proof that you occupied the same piece of earth at the same moment as something you desperately cared about.
I was there.
that’s a different commodity.
popular music would become extremely good at selling it.
the stadium concert eventually evolves into gigantic PA systems, video walls, elaborate staging, synchronized lighting, wristbands, VIP packages and productions capable of moving between continents. but the fundamental product remains recognizable. tens of thousands of strangers agree that being in the same place while music happens matters.
Shea helped reveal just how valuable that could become.
this is why an archive devoted to music cannot merely catalog performers. the archivist has to turn around. the Shea Stadium Index entry should obviously contain the Beatles, the songs, the instruments, the personnel, the date, the promoter, the film and the historical context. but it should also contain the people watching them.
ticket scans. fan photographs. home movies. oral histories. diaries. scrapbooks. letters. fan-club materials. contemporary newspaper interviews. police reports where historically relevant. transportation information. ticket prices. venue capacity. merchandise. demographic evidence where responsibly available. contemporary criticism of the fans. later recollections.
and every item should be labeled for what it actually is. a diary written on august 16, 1965 is not the same kind of evidence as a memory recorded sixty years later. both matter. they simply answer different questions.
statistics work the same way. 55,600 attendees tells us scale. roughly $304,000 in receipts tells us economics. ticket prices tell us accessibility and consumer behavior. television audiences tell us how mass attention was created. venue capacity tells us what promoters thought possible. security numbers, transportation records, fan-club membership, record sales, radio requests, merchandise, contemporary polling and demographic evidence can all tell us something different when reliable figures survive.
but numbers don’t scream.
people do.
that’s why the numbers need the anecdotes and the anecdotes need the numbers. statistics tell us how large the thing was. testimony tells us what being inside that thing felt like.
55,600 is not a crowd. 55,600 is a statistic that conceals 55,600 biographies.
one person waited months for the concert. one fainted. one annoyed her parents. one saved a ticket. one threw hers away and regretted it forever. one could hear the drums. one heard nothing. one watched through binoculars. one spent half the concert staring at Paul. one screamed because everybody else screamed. one didn’t scream at all. one eventually worked for the Beatles. thousands probably went home with sore throats.
and most disappeared from the historical record.
the four people onstage became among the most documented human beings of the twentieth century. the 55,600 people looking back at them became the audience.
two words.
problem solved.
except it isn’t.
because without those people, Shea Stadium is four musicians playing twelve badly amplified songs in the middle of an empty baseball field.
the audience is what turned it into history.
so go back to august 15, 1965. the stage is around second base. the police are watching the stands. the amplifiers are losing. somebody has fainted. another helicopter has caused another eruption. the scoreboard is begging everyone to stay seated. the Beatles emerge, and 55,600 private obsessions suddenly become public at exactly the same moment.
now turn around.
stop watching the four guys.
history has taken very good care of them.
look at everybody else.
listen carefully.
the screaming isn’t covering up the story.
the screaming is the story.
…at least that’s what i hear.

apologies. i’m working on something. hope it works. i’m trying to pull my head out of it long enough to post some shit. trust me. worth it - archivist.

luther vandross, i know, and the strange business of surviving 1998

originally published in VIBE magazine; September 1998

august 14, 1998.

luther vandross knows.

the city is sweating through another august night and somewhere above manhattan the sky has gone the color of dirty television static. taxis keep grinding through intersections. apartment windows glow thirty stories up. radios are coughing out hip hop and r and b and whatever the record companies have decided teenagers need this week. and inside one of those rooms somebody has just put on the new luther vandross record and suddenly all that noise outside seems like somebody else’s fucking problem.

the album is called i know.

of course it is.

luther always sounds like he knows.

he knows you called when you said you would not call. he knows you are pretending everything is fine. he knows somebody left. he knows somebody wants them back. he knows somebody is sitting beside a telephone trying not to pick the damn thing up. luther vandross has spent nearly twenty years turning emotional bad judgment into expensive sounding popular music, and three days after the release of i know, he is still doing it better than nearly everybody who has tried to steal his job.

except now he has changed buildings.

after years with epic, vandross has landed at virgin records, which immediately makes i know interesting before anybody sings a note. this is not some hungry twenty two year old getting his first record deal and praying the label does not throw him into the promotional furnace. this is luther vandross. the man has already sold millions of records. he has grammys. he has produced aretha franklin. he has sung with everybody. he has spent the better part of the eighties and nineties establishing himself as one of the few singers who can make grown adults reconsider terrible romantic decisions at two in the morning.

so what exactly does a new label do with him.

apparently the answer is, let luther be luther, then occasionally remind him that 1998 is happening.

that second part gets complicated.

i meet him in a room that smells like coffee, air conditioning, and the faint chemical perfume of compact disc packaging. luther is relaxed. i am not. i have listened to i know enough times over the past three days that certain background vocals have begun renting space in my skull.

he is sitting back when i tell him that the record sounds, at least in places, like a man defending his territory.

he laughs.

not one of those little publicist approved laughs either. a real one.

you make it sound like somebody is coming after me, he says. i don’t sit down and make a record thinking about who i have to beat. that would drive you crazy. there will always be another singer. there will always be somebody younger. somebody new. somebody getting played on the radio every hour. if i worried about all of that, i wouldn’t have time to sing.

somebody is always coming after you, i tell him.

well, then they better sing, he says. if somebody wants the chair, they better be able to sit in it. but i’m not going to start singing differently because somebody decided that this year everybody has to sound one particular way. i’ve never believed in that.

he stops for a second.

besides, he says, i like my chair.

fair enough.

that is the problem with reviewing luther vandross. eventually criticism runs into the voice and the voice tells criticism to sit the hell down.

keeping my faith in you opens the record with exactly the sort of controlled warmth that has kept luther in bedrooms and wedding receptions for years. nothing is rushed. nothing is desperate. the arrangement gives him room, and luther understands room better than most singers understand melody. younger singers keep treating vocal performance like an olympic event. twenty notes where three would work. runs piled on runs until the original melody has been beaten unconscious.

luther can do all of that.

the important thing is that he usually knows when not to.

i mention that to him.

that’s arranging, he says. singing is arranging too. people forget that. just because your instrument happens to be your voice doesn’t mean you stop making musical decisions. sometimes the best thing you can do is leave the note alone. if the melody is beautiful, why are you fighting with it. sing the melody. then if there’s somewhere you want to go, go there. but you have to earn that.

he leans forward.

i hear singers sometimes and i think, baby, where are you going. come back. the song is over here.

he laughs.

and listen, i love great singing. i love singers who can do things. but everything you can do doesn’t have to happen in the same eight bars.

that restraint matters on this record because i know is trying to do several things at once. it wants to preserve the old vandross kingdom of ballads and immaculate adult r and b while also admitting that the neighborhood around it has changed.

and jesus christ has it changed.

hip hop is no longer knocking around the margins of the industry. it owns real estate. younger r and b singers are building records around harder drums, rap cadences, new production habits, and a different idea of romantic masculinity. radio has changed. mtv has changed. the audience has changed. even the way singers phrase against a beat has changed.

i ask him whether he feels any pressure to chase that.

of course there’s pressure, he says. there’s always pressure. when i started making records there was pressure. when never too much happened there was pressure to do another never too much. when the ballads became successful there was pressure to make more ballads. people always want you to repeat the thing they already understand.

and now they want you younger.

he gives me a look.

i’m not going to be twenty five again for anybody. and i don’t want to be. but that doesn’t mean i’m not listening. i know what’s happening. i hear the records. i hear what younger artists are doing. some of it is wonderful. some of it isn’t. same as it ever was.

so the trick is what.

the trick is figuring out what belongs to you, he says. you can hear something new and let it inspire you without putting on somebody else’s clothes.

that may be the best explanation for i know.

because luther apparently has no intention of becoming a museum exhibit.

good.

the title song is one of the best arguments on the album.

i know has that polished luther architecture, but stevie wonder turns up on harmonica and immediately makes the whole thing feel looser. stevie does not overwhelm the song. he slips through it. luther sings around him. the two sounds belong together so naturally that you start wondering why somebody did not lock these men in a studio years ago and refuse to let them out until they had made an entire album.

i ask luther what it is like directing stevie wonder.

he laughs before i finish the question.

directing stevie.

yeah.

you don’t direct stevie wonder, he says. you tell stevie what the song is. you talk about what you’re hearing. then stevie hears something you didn’t hear, because he’s stevie. that’s the whole reason you want him there. if i wanted somebody to play exactly what i already had in my head, i could find somebody to do that. when you bring stevie in, you want what’s in his head.

did he get it quickly.

stevie gets music quickly, luther says. frighteningly quickly. you’re explaining something and you can see that he’s already gone past where you are. he’s hearing the next thing. and that harmonica has a voice. that’s the thing. it isn’t decoration. when stevie plays harmonica on a vocal record, you have another singer in the room.

so you sing differently.

absolutely, he says. you have to listen. a duet is listening. even if the other voice is a harmonica. you don’t just stand there waiting for your next line.

probably the safest production philosophy in american music.

then there is i’m only human with cassandra wilson.

now this is where things get strange.

wilson has one of those voices that seems to come from somewhere beneath ordinary speech. luther is precision. cassandra is texture. putting them together should either be brilliant or sound like two excellent restaurants sharing one kitchen.

it mostly works.

mostly.

their voices circle each other without becoming the obvious fireworks display somebody in marketing probably imagined when the pairing was suggested. and that is actually what makes it interesting. luther does not try to outsing her. cassandra does not try to become a luther vandross duet partner. they remain themselves.

i tell him that.

that was important, he says. why ask cassandra wilson to sing with me and then ask her not to sound like cassandra wilson. that doesn’t make any sense. she has that beautiful darkness in her voice. that depth. i didn’t want to polish that away.

you sound almost like opposites.

but opposites can have a conversation, he says. that’s what makes it interesting. if you put two people together who approach every note exactly the same way, what are they telling each other. cassandra hears rhythm differently. she places words differently. she has her own space.

did that make you change anything.

sure, he says. you adjust. you listen to the other singer. you don’t say, welcome to my record, now please become me.

there is tension in that.

useful tension.

the album keeps reaching outward.

guru appears. brandy appears. marcella precise appears. the production roster stretches beyond the familiar luther circle. longtime collaborators marcus miller and nat adderley jr. are here, but so are other hands, other rhythms, other ideas.

and luther is perfectly aware that people are going to notice.

everybody keeps asking me about the guests, he says. and i understand why. but i didn’t want a record where you looked at the credits and said, oh, luther invited everybody over. the song has to survive the guest. otherwise it’s a photograph. look who was in the studio. that isn’t enough.

brandy is part of that younger generation everybody keeps talking about.

brandy can sing, he says immediately. and she listens. that matters to me. people get caught up in age and generations and all of that. i care whether somebody can hear. can you hear harmony. can you hear what the other singer is doing. do you know when to move and when to stay out of the way. those things don’t have an age.

sometimes the experiment works.

sometimes you can practically hear the meeting where somebody said, luther needs something younger.

get it right is the obvious crime scene.

the song itself has history. luther produced the original for aretha franklin back in 1983. bringing it back now is a clever idea. attaching rap to it is understandable. this is 1998. rap is not a novelty anymore. anybody pretending otherwise has either been asleep for ten years or works in the upper floors of a major record company.

but luther does not always sound entirely convinced by the modernization happening around him.

and when luther vandross is unconvinced, you can hear it.

that is one of the funny things about a singer this technically immaculate. polish cannot completely hide indifference. the voice will hit the note. the arrangement will behave. the background vocals will arrive wearing freshly pressed shirts.

but the blood pressure changes.

i tell him exactly that.

he looks at me for a few seconds.

so you think i sound bored.

sometimes, i say. not with the singing. with some of the furniture around it.

that’s different, he says. now we’re talking.

he shifts in the chair.

listen, when you’ve been making records for a while, everybody has an opinion about what you’re supposed to do next. everybody. the label. radio. writers. people in the studio. people who heard half a song through somebody’s office wall. everybody knows what your next record should be.

and what do you think it should be.

mine, he says. that’s the first thing. it has to sound like i had some reason to be there.

he keeps going.

i don’t want to make a record that pretends hip hop doesn’t exist. that would be ridiculous. i also don’t want to wake up tomorrow and decide i’m a rapper because somebody showed me a chart. that would be ridiculous too. there has to be a place where the music happening now can meet what i do without either one becoming a costume.

do you think you always found that place on this record.

no artist with any sense thinks every experiment works perfectly, he says. sometimes you try something because you want to hear what happens. that’s what making records is. people hear the finished thing and forget that somebody had to make a decision before anybody knew whether it was going to work.

now we are getting somewhere.

because i know is caught between luther vandross and the machinery surrounding luther vandross.

when the machinery shuts up, the record gets better.

now that i have you is the kind of thing he could probably sing while filling out tax forms and still make somebody reconsider their marriage. the great vandross trick has never simply been vocal power. it is intimacy. he can make an enormous studio production feel embarrassingly private.

the background vocals matter.

they always matter.

luther treats background singing like architecture. listen underneath him and there are little arrangements everywhere. voices answering voices. chords thickening. phrases arriving exactly when the lead needs support.

this is where he really starts talking.

background vocals are not wallpaper, he says. i’ve never treated them that way. those voices can change what the lead means. one chord underneath one word can change the emotion of that word. people think they’re hearing the lead vocal, but sometimes what they’re feeling is everything happening underneath it.

he starts tapping out an imaginary arrangement on the arm of the chair.

you might have the lead holding one note and then the backgrounds move underneath it. suddenly the same note feels different. the singer hasn’t moved. the harmony moved. that’s arranging. that’s drama.

and you learned that before the solo career.

i learned by working, he says. sessions. jingles. background dates. watching people. listening to what happened when somebody changed one part. you learn that a record is not just the person whose face is on the cover. there are a hundred decisions inside three minutes of music.

before the solo records, before the fame, there were sessions, jingles, backing vocals, arrangements, david bowie, chic related sessions, ben e king, roberta flack, bette midler, years of learning how records actually work when nobody was staring at the singer in the center.

you hear that education every time he stacks voices.

this man does not merely sing records.

he constructs them.

and then there are the ballads.

god help us.

because this is where reviewing luther becomes professionally embarrassing.

you begin with standards. objectivity. context. arrangement. production. harmonic movement.

then he holds a note.

fuck.

start over.

the great vandross records have always understood that romantic music is not necessarily happy music. half the time romance is humiliation with good lighting. somebody wants somebody who does not want them. somebody remembers something they should forget. somebody is making promises that everybody listening knows are doomed.

luther sings directly into that mess.

there is sadness all over i know, but it rarely becomes self pity. that distinction matters. luther can sound wounded without sounding helpless. he can sing longing while maintaining dignity.

i ask him why his saddest songs so rarely sound pathetic.

because being hurt doesn’t make you pathetic, he says. everybody gets hurt. everybody has wanted somebody who didn’t want them back. everybody has missed somebody. everybody has made the phone call they knew they shouldn’t make.

there is a pause.

probably more than once.

he smiles.

but dignity is part of the emotion too. you can be devastated and still have dignity. i don’t think you have to sing a sad song like you’ve collapsed on the floor.

although people have probably collapsed on the floor to your records.

that is not my responsibility, he says, laughing. i provide the soundtrack. what you do in your own home is between you and your carpet.

finally.

a legal disclaimer for luther vandross albums.

the production throughout i know is almost obscenely clean. every instrument knows where its shoes are. every snare has showered. every keyboard has a retirement account.

occasionally i wish somebody would spill a drink on something.

that is probably my biggest complaint.

i know could use a little dirt.

not fashionable dirt.

human dirt.

there are moments when the record becomes so polished that you start admiring the upholstery instead of listening to the conversation. vandross has always loved precision, but precision can become insulation. some of these songs need one crooked chair in the room.

i tell him this too.

you really want somebody to spill something in my studio, he says.

metaphorically.

good, because literally we’re going to have a problem.

he laughs.

i understand what you mean. but i like records to sound good. i’m not ashamed of that. somewhere along the way people decided polish means there’s no feeling. i don’t believe that. you can care about every detail and still have emotion. actually, sometimes caring about the detail is how you protect the emotion.

but can perfection get between you and the listener.

sure, he says. anything can. too much production. too little production. too much singing. too little singing. there’s no formula. you listen until the record tells you what it needs.

that sounds suspiciously mystical for a man obsessed with arrangements.

oh, i’m not mystical, he says. i’m picky.

that i believe.

then comes the voice.

again.

always the goddamn voice.

i ask him whether he ever gets tired of people talking about it.

no, because i understand it, he says. the voice is what people hear first. but i hope eventually they hear the rest. i hope they hear the writing. i hope they hear the arrangements. i hope they hear what the musicians are doing. i hope they hear the backgrounds.

and the clothes.

he laughs.

everybody hears the clothes.

the funny thing is that luther vandross in 1998 occupies an increasingly strange position. he is too established to be new. too technically gifted to dismiss. too commercially successful to call a cult singer. too connected to traditional soul and pop craftsmanship to completely chase contemporary r and b trends. and still too curious to simply remake never too much until retirement.

so i know becomes a negotiation.

old luther.

new luther.

virgin records luther.

radio luther.

romantic luther.

dance floor luther.

the luther who knows exactly what he wants.

the luther surrounded by people telling him what 1998 supposedly requires.

i ask him whether leaving epic changed anything psychologically.

of course it did, he says. you spend that many years somewhere and you develop habits. relationships. expectations. then suddenly you’re somewhere else and everybody is looking at you like, all right, what are we going to do.

was that exciting or terrifying.

both, he says. anything worth doing probably has a little of both. i didn’t leave everything i knew about making records at the old building. i brought myself with me. but a change can make you examine things you stopped examining because they became automatic.

did you feel like you had something to prove.

i always have something to prove, he says. not because i think people forgot who i am. because the song you’re working on doesn’t care what you did ten years ago. the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums. you have to sing today.

that one hangs in the room.

the microphone doesn’t give you credit for previous albums.

somewhere inside all of this is the actual man.

and he remains stubbornly difficult to extract from the records.

people have always wanted autobiography from singers. especially singers who specialize in love. we hear somebody describe loneliness convincingly enough and immediately demand names, dates, addresses, photographs, sworn testimony.

luther has never seemed especially interested in giving us that satisfaction.

the songs get the confession.

the public gets the record.

that should probably be enough.

i ask him whether the songs have to come from his own life.

they have to come from somewhere real, he says. but real doesn’t always mean somebody can go look it up. people get confused about that.

so you can sing something you did not literally experience.

of course. singers are storytellers. if every song had to be a police report about something that happened to the singer personally, music would be pretty boring.

then where does the emotion come from.

you find the part you understand, he says. maybe the details aren’t yours. maybe the situation isn’t yours. but loneliness is yours. wanting somebody is yours. losing somebody is yours. hope is yours. you find the truth inside the song and you sing that.

your real.

real is real, he says. the audience knows when you’re lying emotionally. they may not know why they don’t believe you, but they know.

that answer irritates me because it is good.

so i drink more coffee.

outside, 1998 keeps happening.

brandy and monica are fighting over the boy on the radio. hip hop is expanding so quickly that anybody trying to draw its borders looks stupid by lunchtime. r and b is mutating alongside it. producers are becoming stars. beats are getting stranger. the old separation between rapper and singer is collapsing one guest verse at a time.

and here sits luther vandross.

forty seven years old.

new label.

new album.

same impossible instrument in his throat.

i ask him whether he worries that the industry has become obsessed with youth.

the industry has always been obsessed with youth, he says. that isn’t new. what changes is what youth sounds like. every generation thinks it invented being young.

he smiles.

and every generation eventually discovers it didn’t invent love either.

so where does that leave you.

singing about the things that don’t expire, he says. arrangements change. drums change. clothes definitely change. thank god. but people still fall in love. people still screw it up. people still want somebody back. people still lie and say they’re fine when they’re not fine.

he looks over at the cd sitting on the table.

you make records about that and you don’t have to panic every time the chart changes.

i know is not a revolution.

thank god.

we have enough records desperately screaming that they represent the future.

this one represents something harder.

continuity.

not nostalgia.

continuity.

there is a difference.

nostalgia embalms the past.

continuity takes what worked and tries to drag it through another year alive.

sometimes i know drags too hard. sometimes the contemporary touches feel bolted onto the chassis. sometimes the guest appearances look more exciting printed on the back of the cd than they sound coming through the speakers.

but when the record settles into luther’s natural territory, the thing becomes difficult to argue with.

because there are singers.

there are great singers.

and then there are singers who understand what a microphone can do to distance.

luther vandross understands distance.

he understands the six inches between mouth and microphone.

the twelve feet between singer and lover.

the three thousand miles between two people who should have called each other.

the enormous stupid distance between wanting somebody and actually having them.

that is his territory.

maybe that is what he knows.

not love.

nobody knows love.

anybody claiming otherwise is either selling records or getting divorced.

luther knows longing.

he knows the ridiculous negotiations people make with themselves after midnight. he knows the sentences rehearsed into telephones before anybody dials. he knows how adults can become seventeen years old again because one particular person walked into a room.

before i leave, i ask him about the title.

i know.

two words that sound suspiciously certain for a record filled with people who do not seem certain about much of anything.

he smiles.

that’s why it works.

because you don’t know.

because nobody knows, he says. not really. people say i know all the time when what they mean is i hope. or i think. or please let this be true.

now he is laughing.

you thought i was claiming to know everything.

it does sound a little arrogant.

well, maybe i know a few things.

such as.

he settles back into the chair.

i know what a good song feels like. i know when a background part is wrong. i know when somebody sings something and means it. i know stevie wonder can play the harmonica.

anything else.

he thinks for a moment.

i know you’ve had too much coffee.

fair.

and when i know remembers that uncertainty underneath all its immaculate surfaces, it is very good.

when it tries to prove luther vandross belongs in 1998, it occasionally becomes awkward.

he does not need to prove it.

he is here.

three days after the record arrived, that seems like the point everybody is in danger of missing.

luther vandross does not need permission from 1998.

1998 needs to figure out what the hell it intends to do with luther vandross.

the interview stretches past midnight.

somebody comes into the room and says something about the time. luther looks at the clock, looks back at me, and keeps talking anyway.

people think making records gets easier because you’ve made a lot of them, he says. some things get easier. you know the studio. you know your voice. you know what you like. but you also know more ways something can go wrong.

that sounds miserable.

no, he says, smiling. it’s wonderful. because every once in a while everything goes right.

somebody puts the record on again.

the first notes fill the room.

outside, manhattan keeps burning electricity into the august sky.

cars crawl downtown. somewhere somebody kisses somebody. somebody leaves somebody. somebody is sitting beside a telephone making an absolutely terrible decision.

luther listens to his own record for a few seconds.

he does not sing along.

he listens.

that may tell you more about him than anything he has said all night.

the singer everybody else studies is still studying the song.

somewhere a compact disc spins under a little red laser while luther vandross sits beneath the cold studio lights listening for whatever everybody else missed.

the album is called i know.

the title sounds definitive.

the man does not.

the music knows better.

...at least that’s what i hear.

note on historical fiction.

the review is written from the fictional perspective of the archivist on august 15, 1998. the conversations between the archivist and luther vandross are dramatized rather than presented as authenticated interview transcripts. the historical setting, vandross’s career, the release of i know, his move from epic to virgin, the album personnel, collaborations, recordings, and broader musical context are drawn from the historical record available around the album and its period. receipts available upon request.

originally published in the Village Voice; August 15 1956.

the summer sky over america looks bruised tonight.

heat hanging over the sidewalks. radios glowing behind apartment windows. teenagers leaning against automobiles with cigarettes burning down between their fingers. mothers pulling curtains shut. fathers reading newspapers that keep insisting civilization is collapsing because a twenty one year old truck driver from memphis moves his hips when he sings.

and somewhere inside all of this noise a little black rca victor record is spinning at forty five revolutions a minute.

don’t be cruel on one side.

hound dog on the other.

flip it.

america changes depending on which side lands upward.

i have spent the better part of the afternoon listening to the damned thing over and over, and i am beginning to suspect rca has accidentally manufactured a perpetual motion machine. you play don’t be cruel. then you want hound dog. you play hound dog. then you want don’t be cruel again. eventually somebody has to unplug the phonograph or you die there.

elvis presley is twenty one years old.

this seems worth repeating because people already discuss him as though he were an invading army.

twenty one.

the boy from memphis has spent 1956 moving through american popular culture with the speed of somebody who has discovered that every locked door in the music business was mostly plywood. heartbreak hotel came first and suddenly everybody knew the name. then television got involved. then the screaming started. then the newspapers started worrying about juvenile delinquency and sex and rhythm and whatever else middle aged americans decide is destroying civilization whenever young people discover something before they do.

now we have this.

rca victor 47.6604.

released july 13.

don’t be cruel.

hound dog.

one record.

two arguments.

and christ almighty, what a record.

the strange thing is that don’t be cruel is probably the more dangerous side because it does not sound dangerous at all.

it begins with that little guitar figure from scotty moore. clipped. economical. almost ridiculously simple. then elvis comes sliding into the song with the confidence of a man who already knows you are listening.

the rhythm is magnificent because nobody appears desperate to impress anybody.

bill black keeps the bottom moving. d.j. fontana gives the record exactly as much percussion as it needs. shorty long is there on piano. the jordanaires hover around presley and soften the edges without sanding them completely off.

and elvis.

elvis does that strange thing he does where half the performance seems to come from country music and the other half from rhythm and blues, except trying to separate the ingredients after he has swallowed them is becoming increasingly pointless.

people keep asking what kind of music this is.

apparently nobody has considered the possibility that the kid does not give a damn.

the song itself comes principally from otis blackwell, the brooklyn songwriter whose name is already attached to some mighty interesting material. presley shares the writing credit here, and the business arrangements surrounding songwriting credits in this new elvis machinery are probably worth watching carefully.

but whatever happened on the paperwork, the record itself belongs completely to the performance.

don’t be cruel is seduction disguised as good behavior.

please do not hurt me.

please do not leave me.

please come back.

please forget that the fellow asking is singing with enough casual confidence to make the request sound suspiciously like a prediction.

that is the trick.

presley does not oversing it.

he does not beat the song unconscious.

he leaves room.

the pauses matter.

the jordanaires answer him. the rhythm breathes. scotty moore drops guitar phrases into the empty spaces. fontana keeps the whole machine moving without turning the drums into artillery.

it is barely more than two minutes long.

two minutes.

some orchestras spend longer than that tuning.

then you turn the record over.

and the furniture starts moving.

hound dog.

good god.

by now everybody has an opinion about hound dog because everybody has an opinion about elvis presley, including people who apparently hate him so much they cannot stop watching him.

especially those people.

presley has been doing the number onstage for weeks, and television has already turned it into a national morality hearing.

on june 5 he performed it on milton berle’s television program.

that was the one.

the hips.

the screaming.

the slow grind.

the faces in the audience that suggested several respectable citizens had suddenly remembered sex existed.

afterward the criticism came pouring in.

vulgar.

obscene.

animalistic.

the usual vocabulary used by people who discover that teenagers have bodies.

then came steve allen.

july 1.

new york.

presley was stuffed into formal clothes and made to sing hound dog to an actual basset hound wearing formal attire.

you cannot make this country up.

america had somehow decided that the solution to elvis presley was to dress both him and a dog for dinner.

presley went along with it.

he had already indicated that television mattered to him and that he did not want to deliberately make people dislike him.

but watching the whole spectacle you get the feeling that everybody involved understands the joke differently.

allen thinks he has domesticated rock and roll.

the audience thinks it is comedy.

elvis looks like a man serving a short jail sentence.

the next afternoon he walked into rca victor’s studio in new york.

july 2.

and recorded hound dog properly.

that detail matters.

because the record sounds like revenge.

not lyrical revenge. not some childish declaration against steve allen. nothing that neat.

musical revenge.

you wanted the dog.

fine.

here is the goddamn dog.

the session included presley and his regular men. scotty moore on guitar. bill black on bass. d.j. fontana on drums. the jordanaires behind him. shorty long at the piano. stephen sholes handling the rca production responsibilities.

but anyone imagining presley as some obedient hillbilly kid standing wherever the record company tells him to stand ought to spend five minutes thinking about what happened in that room.

hound dog took take after take after take.

presley kept going.

again.

again.

again.

the band had been playing the song live, but recording it was another problem entirely. a stage performance can survive on screaming girls and sweat and movement. a record has nowhere to hide. once that needle drops, every bad decision sits there forever.

so elvis kept pushing.

i imagine the room getting hotter.

cigarette smoke above the musicians.

shirts beginning to stick.

engineers watching the clock.

sholes wondering whether anybody in memphis understands the concept of studio expenses.

elvis standing near the microphone.

again.

scotty moore might have looked toward bill black with that expression musicians develop when they have played the same piece enough times to begin questioning the existence of god.

elvis shakes his head.

no.

again.

fontana settles behind the drums.

another count.

another hound dog.

another attempt.

this is where the popular caricature of presley begins falling apart.

the caricature says he is instinct.

hips.

hair.

luck.

teenage hysteria.

some country kid who wandered into sam phillips’s sun records studio and accidentally became famous.

bullshit.

instinct does not demand thirty odd attempts at a two minute record.

that is work.

that is somebody hearing something in his head and refusing to leave until the loudspeakers reproduce it.

eventually they get there.

and the finished hound dog is almost brutally bare.

drums.

bass.

guitar.

voices.

clapping.

elvis.

nothing is hiding behind strings or brass or some enormous arrangement designed to convince adults that this is respectable music.

it is rhythm stripped down to muscle.

fontana’s drumming is essential. he does not merely keep time. he creates the floor presley stomps across. black’s bass pushes underneath everything. the jordanaires provide those wonderfully absurd vocal punctuations behind elvis, making the record simultaneously tougher and stranger.

then scotty moore takes the guitar break.

beautiful.

ugly.

sharp.

exactly right.

he sounds like he is trying to get six strings arrested.

and presley sings hound dog differently from don’t be cruel because he understands something critics keep refusing to understand.

he knows how to act inside a song.

don’t be cruel requires charm.

hound dog requires contempt.

so he spits the words.

not literally.

but nearly.

the performance is clipped and sarcastic and funny and mean.

there is almost no romance in it.

the original hound dog was written by jerry leiber and mike stoller and became a rhythm and blues hit for big mama thornton a few years ago. thornton’s version is magnificent and filthy with authority. she sings it like somebody throwing a useless man out of the house.

presley is doing something different.

that difference matters.

anybody pretending this music appeared from nowhere is either ignorant or selling something.

rock and roll did not descend from heaven into elvis presley’s pelvis.

black rhythm and blues is all over the foundation of this thing.

gospel is in him.

country is in him.

blues is in him.

the music of the south is tangled together inside these records despite decades of americans insisting that the people making those sounds should remain conveniently separated.

presley is standing right in the middle of that contradiction.

and people can hear it.

that may be part of what frightens them.

i asked one teenager outside a record shop this afternoon why she had bought the single.

she looked at me like i had asked why she required oxygen.

because it is elvis.

that was the entire answer.

fair enough.

another kid had already bought one and was apparently considering another copy because his sister kept stealing his.

what do you like better, i asked.

hound dog.

why.

he shrugged.

it sounds wild.

there you have it.

thousands of words of adult cultural analysis murdered by a teenager in three words.

it sounds wild.

inside the record shop the clerk looked exhausted.

presley.

presley.

presley.

everybody wants presley.

he pointed toward the counter where copies of the record had been moving steadily.

i asked whether people were asking specifically for don’t be cruel or hound dog.

both.

he laughed.

depends which one they heard last.

that may be the secret of this record.

there is no dead side.

normally you buy a single because you want the song on the front. the other side is something you discover accidentally, tolerate twice, then ignore for the remainder of your natural life.

not here.

rca has managed to put two legitimate attractions on one piece of plastic.

don’t be cruel is already climbing through the country like it owns the place, and hound dog is right there beside it.

jukebox operators must be delighted.

or furious.

possibly both.

because now one elvis record occupies two songs worth of attention.

the entire business surrounding presley is moving so quickly that nobody seems capable of explaining it while it is happening.

colonel tom parker is somewhere in the machinery, of course.

parker always seems to be somewhere in the machinery.

the television bookings grow larger.

the crowds grow louder.

the contracts grow fatter.

the outrage grows more theatrical.

and presley keeps singing.

that is the funniest part.

while america conducts a national symposium on whether his hips represent the collapse of western civilization, elvis presley is making increasingly good records.

people forget that part.

hound dog is a good record.

don’t be cruel is an even better one.

yes.

i said it.

hound dog will get the arguments because hound dog has the television scandal attached to it.

but don’t be cruel may be the masterpiece sitting in plain sight.

listen to the control.

listen to the spaces.

listen to how little is required.

the record does not chase you.

it waits for you to come closer.

hound dog grabs the room.

don’t be cruel owns it.

and this brings us to the uncomfortable business of elvis himself.

what exactly are we watching.

nobody knows yet.

that is important.

it is august 13, 1956.

anybody telling you they know what elvis presley means is lying.

maybe he is a fad.

maybe next summer teenagers will be screaming for somebody else.

popular music has buried plenty of kings.

maybe the newspapers are correct and rock and roll will burn itself out after every teenager in america has sufficiently alarmed his parents.

maybe presley will become a strange footnote.

remember that fellow with the sideburns.

maybe.

but stand near a jukebox when this record starts and try believing that.

watch the heads turn.

watch the girls move closer.

watch the boys pretend they are not studying him.

watch grown men complain about presley while knowing his television schedule better than their own children’s birthdays.

something is happening.

you can feel that much.

the argument is no longer whether elvis presley can make a hit record.

that argument is dead.

the question is how much territory one singer can occupy before somebody figures out how to stop him.

and this particular forty five feels like an escalation.

two sides.

two hits.

two versions of the same twenty one year old kid.

on one side he is asking you not to be cruel.

on the other he sounds like he could not care less whether you approve of him.

maybe that is why the record works.

america wants elvis presley civilized.

hound dog refuses.

america wants him harmless.

don’t be cruel smiles.

america wants him categorized.

country.

rhythm and blues.

pop.

hillbilly.

juvenile delinquent.

television novelty.

southern freak.

whatever makes the paperwork easier.

the record keeps spinning.

forty five revolutions a minute.

the needle reaches the center.

somebody walks over.

turns it over.

and starts the whole damn argument again.

i do not know where elvis presley goes from here.

nobody does.

but tonight there are radios glowing across america, and from behind bedroom doors comes that voice, young and cocky and strangely tender, followed a few minutes later by drums and handclaps and a guitar that sounds mildly criminal.

parents are listening from the hallway.

teenagers are listening from the floor.

record executives are listening to cash registers.

preachers are listening for satan.

and elvis presley is somewhere in the middle of all of them.

twenty one years old.

two songs on one record.

and an entire country trying to decide whether to dance or call the police.

...at least that’s what i hear.

that’s what i need to remind you of.

the article is a work of historical fiction grounded in documented events. recording dates, personnel, releases, songs, television appearances, and major biographical circumstances are based on historical sources. private conversations, incidental encounters, descriptions of rooms and streets, and dialogue for which no verbatim contemporary transcript survives have been reconstructed for narrative purposes and should not be interpreted as documentary quotations. receipts on hand.

originally published in Down Beat; July 1937

dallas, texas, june 20, 1937

the texas heat has spent the whole damn day sitting on dallas like judgment.
by evening the sky is purple and swollen over the city, streetcars scrape along the tracks throwing sparks into the dusk, automobile engines cough at intersections, men loosen their collars and women wave newspapers in front of their faces, and somewhere beyond the brick buildings and telephone wires a freight train lets out one long miserable whistle that sounds like the entire country remembering something it would rather forget.
and inside a building at 508 park avenue, robert johnson has just finished singing about hell.
i am standing outside afterward with sweat running down my back and cigarette smoke stuck in my clothes, trying to decide whether the thin young man beside me is exhausted, amused, irritated, hungry, or simply waiting for me to stop asking stupid questions. i was directed here by a friend to see this man with whom the devil owns. how could i not see him? first impression. not at all like the mythology i created in my head. tall. slender. shy. but most of all, young. hat pushed back on his head that i worried about a sudden gust. might take him with it. 
johnson is carrying his guitar.
of course he is.
the thing seems less like luggage than identification.
robert johnson, musician.
that is what i know tonight.
not legend.
not devil.
not ghost.
musician.
and a damned good one.
everything else can wait.
i have spent the better part of the last two days watching men arrange microphones and recording equipment inside a temporary studio while johnson sat down with his guitar and proceeded to make the machinery look ridiculous.
recording equipment is supposed to capture music.
johnson makes it seem like the equipment is trying desperately to keep up.
he has recorded a pile of songs here in dallas for the american record corporation, including hellhound on my trail, little queen of spades, malted milk, me and the devil blues, stones in my passway, drifting blues, and love in vain.
some titles have been attempted more than once.
different takes.
different little decisions.
a word bent differently.
a guitar phrase moved half an inch.
the sort of changes record company men call alternate takes and musicians call playing the damn song again.
don law has been overseeing the business.
law is a producer and talent scout, one of those men whose job requires him to stand between musicians and machinery and somehow convince both sides that everything is proceeding according to plan.
earlier i ask him what he thinks of johnson.
law watches him for a moment before answering.
he has an unusual way of playing, he says.
that is one hell of an understatement.
unusual.
sure.
and texas is a little warm.
johnson plays guitar like a man who has discovered there are more fingers available than anatomy generally permits.
the bass moves.
the treble answers.
little rhythmic figures appear between vocal lines.
the whole thing sometimes sounds like two guitarists who have agreed to share one body because hotel rooms are expensive.
but standing beside him tonight, none of that technical nonsense seems particularly important.
johnson is slight.
handsome in a sharp delicate way.
careful eyes.
a narrow face.
a little mustache.
he dresses well.
better than most musicians who have spent two days wrestling with record company schedules.
his manner keeps changing depending on the question.
sometimes he smiles.
sometimes he looks past me.
sometimes he gives an answer so short that i suspect he has murdered the rest of the sentence before it reached his mouth.
i ask him about hellhound on my trail.
he looks at me.
what about it.
i tell him the song sounds frightening.
he smiles.
supposed to.
that is the interview.
hell of a journalist i am.
i try again.
i ask where the hellhound came from.
johnson shifts the guitar case in his hand.
people get things behind them.
that is all he says.
people get things behind them.
debts.
women.
men.
police.
bad decisions.
memories.
the entire united states government if you are sufficiently unlucky.
take your pick.
i ask whether he believes in the devil.
johnson laughs.
not loudly.
just enough.
you asking everybody that.
no.
should.
then he starts walking.
so i walk with him.
this is apparently how interviews work with robert johnson.
you either keep moving or the interview leaves without you.
dallas slides around us.
storefronts.
cars.
men leaning against buildings.
music leaking through open doors.
the smell of gasoline and hot pavement.
somewhere a radio is playing dance music.
somewhere else somebody is arguing.
america conducts half its business by argument.
johnson does not seem interested in explaining himself.
which makes sense.
musicians generally become less interesting the moment journalists convince them to explain everything.
i ask him where he learned to play.
around.
around where.
around.
fine.
we are making tremendous progress.
i have interviewed furniture with stronger opinions.
then i mention son house.
that gets something.
johnson looks over.
you know son.
i tell him i know of him.
he smiles again.
son can play.
the smile gets wider.
son can talk too.
there is history inside that sentence and johnson knows damned well i can hear it.
musicians around the delta have talked about johnson.
some remember a younger fellow hanging around musicians, eager to play, not yet possessing the command he has now.
then he disappeared for a while.
when he came back, the story goes, something had changed.
his guitar playing had become frighteningly good.
people hate unexplained improvement.
it makes them suspicious.
nobody wants to believe a man went away and practiced.
practice is boring.
the devil is better copy.
so stories grow.
somebody says crossroads.
somebody says midnight.
somebody says satan.
pretty soon hard work has been thrown out of the story because apparently supernatural damnation is easier for people to understand than obsession.
i ask johnson about the crossroads story.
he gives me the longest look of the evening.
then he says.
folks talk.
and keeps walking.
that is it.
folks talk.
the entire mythology of the human race could probably be reduced to those two words.
folks talk.
johnson talks more freely when the subject turns to women.
this should surprise absolutely nobody who has heard the songs.
women appear everywhere in his music.
women leaving.
women arriving.
women causing trouble.
johnson causing trouble.
everybody drinking.
everybody suspicious.
everybody horny.
everybody apparently incapable of maintaining a stable domestic arrangement for longer than three verses.
i ask whether the women in the songs are real.
some.
which ones.
he laughs.
you trying to get me killed.
finally.
a sensible answer.
he tells me he moves around.
mississippi.
arkansas.
tennessee.
wherever work appears.
juke joints.
street corners.
parties.
little places where people want music and have enough coins to make the evening worthwhile.
he talks about watching crowds.
this interests him.
you got to watch them, he says.
i ask why.
they tell you.
tell you what.
what they want.
this may be the smartest thing anybody has said to me all week.
johnson understands an audience.
not theoretically.
not academically.
physically.
he watches bodies.
feet.
faces.
drinking.
conversation.
attention.
if people stop listening, change something.
if people dance, remember what caused it.
if somebody requests a popular tune, play the popular tune.
johnson is apparently capable of learning songs rapidly after hearing them.
blues.
popular songs.
dance numbers.
whatever keeps the room alive and the money moving.
purity is a luxury invented by people who are not trying to make rent.
johnson is working.
that fact gets lost whenever people start whispering about mysterious bluesmen.
he is a professional musician trying to sell records and get jobs.
the supernatural can go fuck itself.
the man has expenses.
i ask him about the recording sessions.
he says recording is strange.
you cannot see nobody.
that bothers him.
playing for a room gives him something back.
movement.
noise.
faces.
the machine gives nothing.
the microphone just sits there.
a little mechanical bastard waiting for perfection.
during the sessions johnson sometimes turns toward the wall while performing.
people will probably invent some grand mystical explanation for this if given enough whiskey and fifty years.
maybe he is shy.
maybe he likes the sound.
maybe he wants fewer eyes on him.
maybe the wall is simply less annoying than everyone else in the room.
johnson does not clarify.
good.
some mysteries deserve protection from journalists.
i ask him about the guitar arrangement on stones in my passway.
this finally gets him talking.
not much.
but enough.
he explains that the guitar has to keep moving underneath the voice.
you stop it, everything stop.
he demonstrates.
right there on the street.
opens the case.
takes out the guitar.
no ceremony.
no dramatic bullshit.
just wood and strings under a texas night.
his thumb begins working the lower strings.
steady.
then the fingers start answering above.
bass.
treble.
voice implied between them.
suddenly the street has rhythm.
a couple walking nearby slows down.
a man across the road looks over.
johnson plays perhaps twenty seconds.
maybe thirty.
then stops.
puts the guitar away.
that is all.
the bastard has just explained more about blues guitar in half a minute than several hundred pages of respectable instruction books could manage.
keep it moving.
everything depends on that.
the bass cannot die when the voice enters.
the rhythm cannot collapse because the singer has something clever to say.
everything keeps traveling.
maybe that is why his songs feel restless.
they do not sit.
they move.
trains appear constantly in blues because trains are everywhere down here, but johnsons music seems to have absorbed the actual mechanics of travel.
departure.
arrival.
distance.
motion.
people vanishing.
people chasing.
people being chased.
tonight hellhound on my trail is still bothering me.
i heard him record it.
i can still hear the opening guitar figure inside my skull.
the song does not need an orchestra.
does not need drums.
does not need some theatrical fool rattling chains in the corner.
johnson sings about being pursued and leaves enough empty air around the words for your imagination to become an accomplice.
that is the nasty trick.
he does not describe everything.
he gives you enough.
then your own mind finishes the job.
i tell him i think it may be the strongest thing he recorded here.
he shrugs.
you like that one.
yes.
he nods.
people like scary things.
i ask why.
he looks toward the street.
cause they know about being scared.
and there it is.
no devil required.
just people.
johnson knows fear because everybody knows fear.
the farmer afraid the crop fails.
the worker afraid the job disappears.
the husband afraid the wife leaves.
the wife afraid the husband comes home drunk.
the black traveler afraid the wrong white man decides tonight is the night to demonstrate authority.
the musician afraid nobody wants another song.
fear does not require imagination in 1937.
america manufactures plenty.
we reach a corner.
johnson stops.
for the first time all evening he seems tired.
not dramatically tired.
just human tired.
recording takes something out of a man.
especially recording this way.
sing.
stop.
adjust.
again.
wait.
another take.
another song.
another little wax master that may or may not become a record somebody buys months from now.
i ask him what happens next.
he shrugs.
play.
where.
wherever.
you going back to mississippi.
probably.
probably.
robert johnson apparently organizes his future with the precision of weather.
i ask what he wants from these records.
this time he thinks.
money would be nice.
we both laugh.
then he adds.
want folks to hear them.
that answer hangs around.
not immortality.
not greatness.
not history.
not influence.
those are words people attach to artists when they have the luxury of looking backward.
tonight robert johnson wants people to hear his records.
that is enough.
somewhere another train whistle cuts across dallas.
johnson turns his head toward it.
for a second the whole street seems suspended between the whistle and the heat.
then traffic starts moving again.
i ask one final question.
what makes a good blues song.
johnson thinks.
truth.
then he smiles.
and a good guitar.
fair enough.
he starts away.
guitar in hand.
thin figure moving down a dallas street beneath electric signs and telephone wires and a moon trying to force itself through the texas haze.
i watch him go.
i have no idea where robert johnson will be tomorrow.
memphis.
mississippi.
arkansas.
another room.
another woman.
another bottle.
another juke joint.
another train.
maybe these records will sell.
maybe they will disappear into the enormous american pile of shellac records and unpaid bills.
maybe somebody in chicago will hear one.
maybe some kid in mississippi will spend seventy five cents because the title sounds dangerous.
nobody knows.
especially johnson.
especially me.
history is easy when you already know the ending.
tonight there is no ending.
there is only june 1937.
there is dallas.
there is a young black musician from mississippi carrying a guitar down the street after spending two days putting songs onto wax.
and there is that damned voice still hanging inside my head.
i believe ill dust my broom.
sweet home chicago.
hellhound on my trail.
stones in my passway.
love in vain.
songs about leaving because staying has never been particularly reliable.
songs about women because neither has love.
songs about fear because fear is cheap and everybody can afford it.
songs about roads because roads at least admit they are taking you somewhere else.
robert johnson disappears around the corner.
no thunder.
no smoke.
no devil waiting under a streetlamp with paperwork.
just a musician heading toward whatever comes next.
and maybe that is stranger.
because men are always trying to turn musicians into myths when the musicians themselves are busy trying to find supper.
the train whistles again.
somewhere beyond dallas somebody is probably singing.
johnson keeps walking.
and i can still hear that guitar.
...at least thats what i hear.

originally published in Rolling Stone; February 8 1968

folsom state prison, january 13, 1968

the walls rise out of the california morning like somebody built a monument to the permanent consequences of bad decisions. granite. steel. gun towers. razor wire. cold january light spread across the yard. the whole goddamn place looks drained of color except for the black clothes moving toward the entrance.

johnny cash.

i follow a few steps behind him carrying my notebook and wondering exactly what series of decisions has resulted in me spending saturday morning walking voluntarily into folsom state prison.

then the steel door closes behind us.

clang.

jesus christ.

that sound.

you can hear every year ever served here in that sound.

johnny stops for half a second. not theatrically. nobody is posing yet. jim marshall is around somewhere with his camera, bob johnston is worrying about recording equipment, guards are watching us with the professionally bored expressions of men who have seen enough human stupidity to stop being surprised by any of it. but johnny hears that door.

we all hear it.

and suddenly every song about prison ever written feels slightly embarrassing.

because songs end.

that door does not.

june carter is walking nearby. black dress. alert eyes. completely unimpressed by the mythology already beginning to collect around the man she plans to marry in a couple of months. that might be the first useful thing i learn about june carter today. johnny cash may be walking into folsom carrying the accumulated weight of every outlaw fantasy country music has managed to sell america, but june knows the actual johnny. the exhausted one. the stubborn one. the funny one. the recovering one. the deeply religious one. the pain in the ass.

i ask her whether he is nervous.

she looks toward him.

a little.

then she gives me the sort of expression that says i have asked a fairly stupid question.

not scared of the prisoners, she explains. nervous because the day matters to him.

that distinction is important.

johnny has been playing prisons for years. san quentin. huntsville. other joints scattered around the country. he has been writing about convicts since before anybody had particularly good reason to believe him. he wrote folsom prison blues after seeing a movie about folsom while serving in the air force. the mythology eventually became so efficient that plenty of people seem to think cash himself served hard time.

he did not.

he has spent nights in jail.

that is not the same thing.

there are men inside these walls who could explain the difference with considerable enthusiasm. especially this kid in the crowd. can't be older than 19, but he wears the denim anyway. before the show, as we are all herded into the auditorium, i heard this kid talking to another inmate about how his "mamma tried."

june knows this. johnny knows this. the prisoners sure as hell know this.

which means there will be no bluffing today.

inside, the dining hall has been turned into a concert room through that peculiar institutional magic where you move some furniture, install microphones, hang a banner, and pretend a room built for swallowing food in captivity is suddenly carnegie hall.

the banner says welcome johnny cash.

the prisoners begin coming in.

this is where the atmosphere changes.

these are not extras.

they are not the picturesque american outlaw population.

they are men.

some old. some frighteningly young. some smiling. some staring. some carrying the dead eyed patience that comes from living according to bells, doors, counts, orders, and somebody else's clock. armed guards are positioned above them. the inmates have been instructed to remain seated. tensions around the prison have been serious enough that nobody wants spontaneous movement mistaken for something else.

rock and roll has played some hostile rooms.

this is different.

i look at june.

she is studying the audience.

you can almost watch her recalibrate.

the carter family has played practically every kind of american room that will hold folding chairs. theaters. churches. fairs. radio studios. schoolhouses. auditoriums. joints where the dressing room is apparently a broom closet with ambitions. june understands audiences.

this audience cannot go home afterward.

that changes everything.

she tells me that johnny understands these men because he understands being trapped.

not literally.

internally.

there is the whole cash biography hiding inside that distinction. pills. booze. arrests. religious guilt. ambition. collapse. recovery. relapse. june has seen enough of it up close to qualify for combat pay. when she talks about johnny and confinement she is not pretending he knows what a ten year sentence feels like. she means that johnny knows what it is to build a cell inside your own skull and then spend years looking for the key.

and now the bastard is going to sing.

hugh cherry gets things moving. carl perkins is here. the statler brothers are here. the tennessee three are here. luther perkins with that guitar style so stripped down you could probably fit the entire thing into a matchbox. marshall grant. w s holland. bob johnston overseeing the recording.

columbia has brought tape machines into a maximum security prison.

record companies usually prefer stealing your freedom contractually.

today they have gone directly to the source.

then comes the introduction.

johnny walks out.

the room erupts.

not beatlemania screaming. not teenage hysteria. something heavier. men yelling because for once they have been permitted to yell. men making noise inside an institution constructed around telling them when they can move, when they can eat, when they can sleep, when they can speak.

johnny steps to the microphone.

hello.

i am johnny cash.

and then that guitar starts.

folsom prison blues.

of course it does.

what the hell else could he open with.

the first notes hit and the place comes alive.

then he gets to the line about shooting a man in reno.

the prisoners roar.

johnny grins.

i glance at june.

she shakes her head and smiles.

he knows exactly what he is doing.

this is the part future polite society will probably misunderstand. they will hear the cheering and imagine a room celebrating murder. bullshit. the reaction is partly recognition and partly release and partly the delicious obscenity of hearing a famous man stand inside a prison and sing the forbidden language of consequences directly to the people living them.

cash does not patronize them.

that may be the entire secret.

he does not come in talking like a missionary addressing fallen souls. he does not perform rehabilitation at them. he does not treat them as sociological material. he treats them like an audience.

a rough audience.

a dangerous audience.

an audience with armed guards standing overhead.

but an audience.

that respect travels both ways.

the tennessee three sound magnificent because they sound like machinery that has forgotten all unnecessary parts. guitar. bass. drums. cash's voice. nothing decorative. nothing begging for approval.

songs begin piling up.

cocaine blues.

the wall.

dark as a dungeon.

twenty five minutes to go.

the last one lands hard.

you can feel the gallows humor running through the room. cash understands something that respectable americans never seem to understand about people surviving terrible circumstances.

they joke.

of course they fucking joke.

sometimes humor is the last possession nobody can confiscate.

between numbers cash cracks jokes about prison water and the conditions around him. the inmates laugh because he is acknowledging what everybody already knows.

folsom is not an abstraction to them.

it is breakfast.

it is the bunk.

it is the toilet.

it is the guard.

it is tomorrow.

june eventually walks onto the stage and the reaction changes instantly.

catcalls.

whistles.

shouts.

she handles it beautifully.

naturally.

this is june carter.

she was born into a family that practically helped invent the grammar of commercial country music. you are not going to rattle her with a dining hall full of horny convicts.

she and johnny sing together.

there is chemistry there that you do not need a doctorate to identify.

they spar.

they grin.

johnny looks different when june is beside him. lighter somehow. still cash. still that bass voice rolling around the concrete. but the severity cracks.

later when she steps away i tell her the room changes when she joins him.

she laughs.

she knows.

then she says something more interesting.

watch him with them.

so i do.

and she is right.

johnny keeps looking at the prisoners.

really looking.

not over them.

not through them.

at them.

the distinction is tiny until you are one of the people society has decided not to look at anymore.

and then it is everything.

there is another story moving underneath the concert.

glen sherley.

an inmate.

armed robbery.

songwriter.

last night reverend floyd gressett brought johnny a recording made by sherley. a song called greystone chapel. written about the chapel here inside folsom.

johnny heard it.

once.

and decided he wanted to sing it.

because apparently normal preparation is for cowards.

he stayed up learning the damn thing.

now sherley is sitting out there without knowing exactly what is coming.

i mention this to june.

she smiles.

that is johnny, she tells me.

and there is affection in it, but also resignation.

because living around johnny cash must involve waking up regularly to discover that your plans have been replaced by whatever enormous moral impulse entered his head at three in the morning.

eventually cash approaches the microphone again.

the room settles.

he explains that the next song was written by a man right here in folsom prison.

something moves through the audience.

not noise exactly.

recognition.

johnny says the name.

glen sherley.

and sherley comes alive.

the reaction around him is immediate.

men cheering.

turning.

looking.

one of theirs.

that matters.

johnny tells him they are going to try to do his song justice.

then they play greystone chapel.

i stop writing.

sometimes the notebook becomes insulting.

sherley is sitting inside the prison that owns his days while johnny cash is standing onstage singing sherley's words back to the prison.

think about that.

every machinery of american culture says the famous man is supposed to be the important one here. the recording contract says it. the microphones say it. the photographers say it. the record company says it. the banner literally has johnny's name on it.

but for a few minutes the center of gravity moves.

the important man is sitting among the inmates.

glen sherley.

prisoner.

songwriter.

heard.

when the song ends johnny reaches down.

sherley reaches up.

they shake hands.

the room loses its goddamn mind.

i look at june.

she is watching johnny.

there is pride in her face.

also concern.

because she knows the dangerous part of johnny's compassion.

he does not know how to do it halfway.

if somebody gets under his skin, they are there.

if he believes somebody has been forgotten, he wants to drag them back into the world personally.

there are worse flaws.

there are safer ones.

the applause keeps coming.

johnny stands there absorbing it, and for one strange second folsom does not feel like a concert venue at all.

it feels like testimony.

not religious testimony exactly, though god knows cash carries enough baptist thunder around inside him to power several rural counties.

human testimony.

i was here.

you saw me.

i heard you.

you heard me.

maybe that is what records are supposed to do before the businessmen get hold of them.

the show eventually ends because everything does except sentences and record company accounting.

the prisoners remain prisoners.

the guards remain guards.

the walls remain exactly where california put them.

that is important.

nobody has been liberated by country music.

no steel door has dissolved because somebody played a good set.

romanticizing prison is easy when you can leave it.

i can leave.

johnny can leave.

june can leave.

bob johnston can leave with his tapes.

jim marshall can leave with his photographs.

glen sherley cannot.

that fact follows me toward the exit.

june and i walk behind johnny.

he looks exhausted now.

not destroyed.

spent.

the useful kind of exhaustion that comes after you have put something real into the room and cannot get it back.

i ask june what she thinks happened in there.

she takes a while before answering.

she says johnny gave them respect.

then she corrects herself.

they gave it to him too.

there it is.

the whole morning in one exchange.

outside, california continues pretending it is a normal saturday.

cars move.

people buy groceries.

radios play.

somewhere a kid is probably listening to the byrds or aretha or hendrix and thinking music is changing faster than anyone can document it.

maybe it is.

but inside folsom state prison this morning something older happened.

a man stood in front of other men and told stories.

murder.

regret.

loneliness.

god.

women.

trains.

freedom.

the usual cash inventory.

except the stories were being told to people who could test every word against experience.

bullshit would not survive long in that room.

johnny cash survived.

more than survived.

he belonged there for those sixty odd minutes precisely because he understood that he did not belong there.

that is the paradox everybody is going to screw up when they write about this.

johnny cash is not a convict.

he is not pretending to be one.

he is a singer.

today he used that job correctly.

the steel door opens.

we walk through.

then it closes behind us.

clang.

same sound.

completely different when you are standing on the free side.

i look back at the wall.

somewhere behind it glen sherley is still a prisoner.

somewhere behind it men are probably talking about the show.

somewhere behind it the dining hall is becoming a dining hall again.

and somewhere inside bob johnston's tape boxes is the sound of several hundred incarcerated men reminding america that they exist.

i have filled pages trying to explain what happened.

june managed it in a sentence.

respect went both ways.

maybe that is all this was.

maybe that is why it felt so much bigger.

...at least that’s what i hear.

receipts.

Beley, Gene. Interview material in Erin Blakemore, “I Went With Johnny Cash to Folsom Prison.” History, 12 Jan. 2018, updated 28 May 2025. Beley was one of the reporters actually present at the January 13, 1968 concert, making his recollections particularly valuable for the prison atmosphere, inmate reactions, security, and Glen Sherley’s response to hearing Cash perform “Greystone Chapel.”

Cash, Johnny. At Folsom Prison. Columbia Records, 1968. The original live album remains the essential primary source for Cash’s performance, stage remarks, song selection, June Carter’s appearance, and the general sonic character of the event.

Cash, Johnny, and Patrick Carr. Cash: The Autobiography. HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

Cash, Johnny. Man in Black. Zondervan, 1975. Cash’s first autobiography is useful for understanding his religious convictions, drug problems, relationship with June Carter, identification with prisoners, and the personal mythology surrounding his arrests and outlaw image.

Hilburn, Robert. Johnny Cash: The Life. Little, Brown and Company, 2013. A major modern Cash biography, particularly useful for separating the historical Cash from the increasingly elaborate Man in Black mythology.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece. Da Capo Press, 2004. This is probably the single most important secondary source for the article. Streissguth used Folsom Prison and Columbia Records archival material to reconstruct the concert, its origins, Cash’s career circumstances, and the recording itself.

Streissguth, Michael. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, Revised and Updated. University Press of Mississippi, 2019. The revised edition adds material to Streissguth’s original study and places the concert within Cash’s artistic development, the California prison system, and the wider musical culture of the period.

the piece you just read is historical fiction, duh. points and references made are indeed fact, but put in fictional prose. So before anyone thinks they got me in a “gotcha” moment, go ahead and sit on that for a while longer….

https://preview.redd.it/kw9w8329ikih1.png?width=1448&format=png&auto=webp&s=90a273779eaf8ebc1d30424d0b3d69cca64368a0

today's list looks like somebody broke into the world's record stores at three in the morning and started grabbing whatever looked dangerous. william onyeabor gives us homemade nigerian synth funk from a guy who eventually decided the music business could go screw itself. les rallizes dénudés turn japanese psychedelia into an electrical malfunction. mercedes sosa reminds everybody that a folk song can carry enough political weight to scare an actual government. scientist takes jamaican reggae apart at the mixing board just to see what happens when you start removing the supposedly necessary pieces. then dur dur band proves eighties somalia had funk and disco grooves that deserve considerably more attention than they got outside east africa.

from there haruomi hosono shows up before yellow magic orchestra and reminds us that the electronic mastermind started out making wonderfully strange, relaxed japanese folk rock. then marcos valle closes the whole mess with "estrelar," a brazilian boogie groove so ridiculously smooth it makes half the eighties sound like everybody else was working with defective equipment. nigeria. japan. argentina. jamaica. somalia. japan again. brazil. synth funk. noise. nueva canción. dub. somali disco. psychedelic folk. boogie. absolutely no fucking theme except great records and the increasingly obvious suspicion that we've all been listening to a criminally small percentage of the music humanity bothered to make.

...at least that's what i hear.

marcos valle. estrelar. 1983. brazil. mpb. boogie. jazz funk.

this thing is obscenely smooth. not smooth in the horrible eighties dentist office sense. smooth because every damn part knows exactly where it belongs. the bassline starts working immediately, the synthesizers slide around it, valle barely seems interested in raising his voice, and suddenly you've spent several minutes inside one of the slickest brazilian grooves of the decade without noticing how technically precise the whole operation is. that's the irritating part. musicians spend years learning how to sound complicated. valle makes complicated sound casual.

and valle had already been through several musical lives before this. bossa nova songwriter in the sixties. mpb. psychedelia. jazz. funk. then the eighties arrive and instead of becoming one of those aging musicians complaining that synthesizers ruined everything, he starts fucking around with boogie and electronic production. sensible man. “estrelar” became a major brazilian dance hit, and valle has talked over the years about his willingness to absorb whatever music was happening around him rather than guarding some sacred idea of what brazilian music was supposed to sound like. that's why the record works. nobody is trying to preserve 1965 in formaldehyde.

the funniest part is how modern the damn thing still sounds. you could drop that bassline into a club set now and nobody would need a history lecture first. they'd just move. which is ultimately the test that matters. critics can argue about mpb and boogie and jazz funk and production techniques until somebody turns the lights off.

the bass already settled the argument.

...at least that's what i hear.

before haruomi hosono helped yellow magic orchestra start screwing with the future of electronic pop, he made hosono house, and rose and beast comes from that earlier version of the guy. acoustic guitars, bass, laid back rhythm, american roots music floating around in the background, but filtered through hosono's own instincts until trying to slap a neat genre sticker on it becomes mostly pointless. this isn't the shiny synthesizer laboratory people associate with later hosono. it's warmer, scruffier, more domestic, and ridiculously relaxed. the bastard makes it sound easy.

hosono recorded hosono house after happy end had broken up, and the album became one of those records whose influence kept growing long after the original release. decades later he went back and rerecorded the entire thing as hochono house, including a new version of rose and beast. that's either obsessive self examination or the musical equivalent of finding an old photograph and deciding you need to have another argument with the person in it. probably both. what's great is hearing the distance between the two versions. same songwriter, same song, completely different lifetime sitting behind it. before the electronic pioneer, before ymo, before hosono became one of the names everybody cites when explaining why japanese pop and electronic music became so fucking interesting, there was this. a guy writing strange, beautiful little songs and already refusing to stay put.

...at least that's what i hear.

and now we're back to screwing with electricity.

scientist was absurdly young when he became one of dub's great engineers, learning his craft around king tubby's studio and eventually developing a mixing style so aggressive and playful that the console stops feeling like equipment and starts feeling like part of the band. dance of the vampires comes from scientist rids the world of the evil curse of the vampires, which remains one of the greatest album titles ever devised by anybody with access to marijuana and graphic design.

the roots radics provide the foundation. scientist starts fucking with it.

bass disappears. drums jump forward. voices appear and evaporate. echo goes wandering through the room. instruments are removed and returned whenever scientist feels like it. that's dub. you're not simply recording musicians anymore. you're taking an existing performance apart and rebuilding it in real time.

scientist has spent years arguing for recognition of the engineer's creative role in dub, and he's right. treating this stuff as merely remixes misses the entire point. the mixing board becomes compositional equipment. subtraction becomes arrangement. space becomes something you manipulate.

and somehow dance of the vampires eventually wound up on k jah in grand theft auto iii, meaning thousands of people who had never heard the word dub were accidentally getting a jamaican music history lesson while stealing digital cars and fleeing the police.

education takes many forms.

then everything stops fucking around.

violeta parra wrote gracias a la vida in chile and recorded it shortly before her death in 1967. the title means thanks to life, which sounds dangerously close to inspirational poster territory until you actually hear the song. gratitude here isn't cute. it's complicated. life gives you beauty and love and pain and loss and eventually takes everything back. thanks anyway.

mercedes sosa understood that weight.

her voice is enormous, but she never uses size as a cheap trick. every line feels deliberate. sosa became one of the central voices of nueva canción and sang material tied to social justice, workers, political struggle, and latin american identity. during argentina's military dictatorship she was harassed, censored, and eventually arrested during a concert in la plata in 1979 along with members of the audience. she later went into exile.

imagine a government being frightened of a folk singer.

actually, don't.

history keeps doing it.

sosa eventually returned to argentina in 1982 and performed a legendary series of concerts in buenos aires. by then her voice carried more than songs. exile. politics. survival. an entire country's bruises seemed to sit somewhere inside that contralto.

gracias a la vida isn't merely beautiful.

it's earned.

now somebody has turned the amplifier up too far and nobody is coming to stop them.

night of the assassins is basically a bass line, drums, mizutani's guitar, and an astonishing refusal to behave. that's enough. the riff repeats until repetition stops being structure and becomes the entire damn environment. then the guitar starts tearing holes through everything.

les rallizes dénudés existed almost completely outside the normal machinery of the record business. very few officially released recordings during their original lifetime. endless live tapes. bootlegs copied from bootlegs copied from somebody's mysterious cassette that probably spent fifteen years underneath a car seat. mizutani cultivated almost no conventional public profile, which meant the band gradually became one of those names obsessive listeners passed around like classified information.

and yes, some recordings sound terrible.

that's part of the deal.

this isn't audiophile music for men comparing speaker cables. it's music that sometimes sounds like the recording equipment barely survived. when it works, though, jesus christ. the distortion isn't sitting on top of the song. it is the song.

william onyeabor made funk for people who think regular funk contains entirely too few synthesizers. fantastic man runs on this wonderfully stubborn groove while keyboards beep, wobble, and repeat themselves until the whole thing becomes impossible to escape. it isn't slick. thank god. polish would've killed half the charm. onyeabor's production feels homemade and futuristic at the same time, which is probably why the record still sounds stranger than mountains of expensive electronic music made decades later.

then onyeabor basically walked away from music. became a businessman. became deeply religious. refused to explain himself properly. when luaka bop spent years trying to assemble the compilation who is william onyeabor, the label discovered that answering the title wasn't particularly easy because onyeabor wasn't interested in feeding the mythology. eventually the documentary fantastic man appeared and gave us pieces of the story, but the mystery remained. good. not every musician needs to spend retirement explaining which synthesizer they used on track four.

sometimes the record is enough.

by the archivist.

originally published in People’s Song Bulletin; June 1946

the union hall smelled of cigarettes, coffee, damp wool, and men who had been working since before daylight. outside, california was still selling sunshine to anybody with railroad fare. inside, woody guthrie sat on an orange crate with a guitar across his knees and looked considerably less interested in sunshine.

posters were nailed crookedly to the walls. workers of the world unite. no more hunger. no more war. guthrie’s guitar carried its own announcement.

this machine kills fascists.

he rolled a cigarette, struck a match, and looked across at me as though an interview were merely another interruption between songs.

i opened my notebook.

the archivist. mr. guthrie, people have called you a folk singer, a hillbilly singer, a protest singer, a union singer. what do you call yourself.

guthrie. woody works pretty good.

he grinned.

guthrie. folks get awful worried about what kind of singer you are. i figure if you’re singing to folks, that’s folk music. if you’re singing to cows, maybe that’s cow music.

he took a pull from the cigarette.

guthrie. mostly i sing about what i see.

that sounds simple until you remember what woody guthrie has seen.

he has seen oklahoma dust turn noon into midnight. he has seen families pack everything they owned into automobiles that weren’t worth the gasoline inside them. he has ridden freight trains and slept alongside roads. he has watched california growers advertise for workers and then curse them for arriving. he has sung in migrant camps where a song sometimes had to perform the work of a newspaper, a sermon, and a stiff drink.

guthrie does not possess what the radio men would ordinarily call a beautiful voice.

that is beside the point.

his voice has dust in it. it bends around words instead of polishing them. when he sings about a hungry family, you do not get the impression that somebody in new york hired him to imagine one.

the archivist. your songs are mighty political.

guthrie. eating’s political if somebody else owns all the groceries.

there was laughter from somewhere behind us.

guthrie didn’t laugh.

the archivist. do you consider yourself an entertainer.

guthrie. sure. nobody wants to sit around all night listening to some fellow holler speeches at them.

he tapped the guitar.

guthrie. that’s why you put a tune under it.

there is the guthrie method in miniature. three chords if three will do. a melody people can remember before they’ve finished hearing it. words about farms, bankers, deputies, dust storms, union organizers, crooked bosses, pretty girls, hard traveling, hungry children, and the peculiar american habit of promising everybody paradise while charging admission at the gate.

the songs travel because they are built to travel.

you don’t need an orchestra.

you need somebody who remembers the words.

i pointed my pencil toward the guitar.

the archivist. what about that sign you’ve got painted there.

guthrie looked down.

this machine kills fascists.

guthrie. well, i don’t reckon it’ll kill one if i hit him over the head with it.

he smiled.

guthrie. might dent the guitar.

then his expression tightened.

guthrie. fascism comes around telling you some people ain’t people. tells you your neighbor’s your enemy. tells working folks to fight each other while somebody else counts the money. a song can tell the other side of that story.

the archivist. can a song really fight something that big.

guthrie scratched his cheek.

guthrie. one song. maybe not.

he looked around the union hall.

guthrie. but get a couple thousand people singing it.

that answer hung around longer than the cigarette smoke.

this is the curious thing about guthrie. on paper his songs can look almost too plain. then he sings them and the plainness becomes the weapon. there is nowhere for the idea to hide. no fancy arrangement comes running to rescue you from the words.

when guthrie sings about migrants being run out of town, he names the town.

when he sings about a river, you can practically smell it.

when he sings about america, he loves the country enough to complain about what has been done to it.

that last point seems important.

the archivist. some people might say criticizing america makes a man unpatriotic.

guthrie leaned forward.

guthrie. if your roof’s leaking and you tell somebody about it, that don’t mean you hate the house.

he knocked ash onto the floor.

guthrie. means you don’t want the damn thing falling in.

there was another laugh.

this time guthrie joined it.

the archivist. where do the songs come from.

guthrie. everywhere. newspapers. people talking. trains. camps. somebody tells you about losing his farm. woman tells you what happened to her boy. you hear something walking down the road. sometimes an old tune’s already there and you just put some new words on it.

the archivist. doesn’t that bother you. borrowing old melodies.

he looked genuinely puzzled.

guthrie. hell, that’s what they’re for.

there may be no sentence more foreign to the modern machinery of tin pan alley.

popular music has become increasingly concerned with ownership. publishers own songs. companies own performances. networks own airtime. guthrie seems to regard a melody more like a public road. somebody built it once. everybody has been walking over it ever since.

the archivist. what makes a good song.

he thought about this longer than the other questions.

guthrie. one people need.

the archivist. not one people like.

guthrie. better if they like it.

another grin.

guthrie. otherwise you’re liable to be singing it by yourself.

somebody called from the hall that it was nearly time.

guthrie crushed the cigarette beneath his boot and stood. the guitar came up with him, battered and scratched and looking as though it had traveled every mile its owner had.

in a few minutes he would walk before a room of laborers and sing.

there would be no spotlight worth mentioning. no tuxedo. no orchestra leader waving a baton. no velvet curtain.

just a skinny oklahoman with a guitar and a dangerous suspicion that ordinary people ought to hear songs about themselves.

he started toward the stage.

i had one question left.

the archivist. woody.

he turned.

the archivist. what are you trying to accomplish with all these songs.

for once there was no joke.

guthrie. make people feel like they ain’t alone.

then he headed toward the stage.

and perhaps that explains woody guthrie better than all the political labels ever attached to him.

he sings for the fellow whose farm disappeared beneath the dust. the mother standing in a relief line. the migrant sleeping beside highway 99. the union man wondering whether anybody outside the hall gives a damn.

woody guthrie gives a damn.

then he puts it to three chords so everybody else can give a damn together.

i closed the notebook. somewhere behind the curtain guthrie hit the first chord, and the room came alive. not carnegie hall alive. not hollywood alive. something older and considerably more useful. a hundred tired people recognizing themselves in a song.

maybe that’s what folk music is.

maybe that’s what woody meant all along.

and maybe that battered guitar really could kill fascists after all.

you just had to get enough people singing.

originally published in Spin magazine, October 1992.

by the archivist 

august 1992.

backstage smells like sweat, warm beer, electrical equipment, cigarette smoke, and whatever industrial chemical they use to clean an arena after twenty thousand people have spent three hours losing their goddamn minds.

metallica are suddenly everywhere.

that sentence would have sounded ridiculous five years ago.

the band that once seemed specifically engineered to frighten radio programmers is now being played by those same programmers. the black album debuted at number one. enter sandman has escaped heavy metal entirely and wandered into ordinary american life. nothing else matters has metallica doing something dangerously close to a ballad without spontaneously combusting. arenas are packed. mtv wants them. radio wants them. magazines want them. people who probably couldn’t tell ride the lightning from an actual electrical accident suddenly own metallica records.

producer bob rock would later say that the band was already looking toward the big leagues before he arrived. metallica had gone platinum with and justice for all, but the black album stripped away some of the labyrinthine arrangements, fattened the bottom end, and made the songs hit with brutal simplicity. 

and now i am standing backstage trying to figure out whether metallica conquered mainstream america or mainstream america simply surrendered.

james hetfield is holding a guitar.

lars ulrich is incapable of remaining still.

kirk hammett looks considerably more relaxed about this entire circus.

jason newsted looks like a man who could probably play another three hour concert immediately if somebody accidentally plugged the amplifiers back in.

i open the notebook.

the archivist. you guys realize something fairly absurd has happened, right. you’re one of the biggest bands in the world.

lars ulrich. yeah. it’s fucking weird.

the archivist. that’s the official explanation.

lars. pretty much.

he laughs.

in 1992 this is the central metallica contradiction. they spent a decade building an audience largely without traditional pop radio, then released an album accessible enough to crash directly into mainstream rock culture. contemporary coverage described the black album as the record that finally pushed them into that mainstream. 

the archivist. did you actually expect this album to become this enormous.

james hetfield. no. you can’t really plan that shit. we wanted the songs to be stronger. simpler doesn’t necessarily mean easier. sometimes it’s harder because there’s nowhere to hide.

the archivist. which sounds suspiciously like maturity.

james. don’t say that.

lars laughs.

lars. take it back.

the archivist. metallica discovers maturity. there’s tomorrow’s headline.

james. fuck you.

fair enough.

the change is obvious though. and justice for all could occasionally feel like four furious mechanics assembling a battleship while somebody kept changing the blueprints. the black album is different. the riffs breathe. the drums sound enormous. the songs repeat themselves long enough for civilians to remember them.

that wasn’t accidental.

bob rock later remembered that lars specifically wanted the band to groove more, while james was pushing himself toward more direct songwriting. rock’s recollection is particularly important because he rejected the popular idea that he single handedly commercialized metallica. according to him, the band had already decided to change before he arrived. 

the archivist. let’s use the filthy word.

kirk hammett. which one.

the archivist. accessible.

everybody groans.

the archivist. jesus christ. you’d think i said barry manilow.

lars. there’s nothing wrong with being accessible if you’re doing what you want. the problem would be sitting around saying, okay, how do we write something that’ll get played on the radio.

the archivist. but radio did play it.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. a lot.

lars. yeah.

the archivist. funny how everybody suddenly develops excellent taste once there’s money involved.

lars grins.

jason newsted. people are coming to the shows. that’s the thing. you look out there and there’s all these different people now. but they’re fucking into it.

and there are a hell of a lot of them.

metallica’s touring operation has become almost hilariously gigantic. the wherever we may roam era is built around marathon performances and an elaborate stage designed to put the band among the audience rather than safely separated from it. this isn’t four guys playing the club circuit anymore. this is heavy metal infrastructure.

the archivist. does playing for twenty thousand people change what happens inside your head.

james thinks about it.

james. once you’re playing, not really. you’re trying to connect with whoever’s there. whether it’s five hundred people or twenty thousand.

the archivist. bullshit.

he smiles.

james. okay. twenty thousand is louder.

the archivist. thank you.

there’s another problem nobody can avoid.

the old fans.

because nothing enrages certain music fans quite like discovering that the secret band they loved has been discovered by the asshole sitting three desks away at work.

the archivist. you’ve been accused of selling out.

james. we’ve been accused of shit forever.

the archivist. does it bother you.

james. you can’t make records worrying about what somebody thinks you’re supposed to sound like. then you’re making their record.

that’s the strange position metallica occupies in 1992. they’re being attacked for becoming successful while still sounding heavier than virtually anything sharing commercial radio space with them.

this isn’t poison suddenly wearing slayer shirts.

enter sandman is still a massive ugly riff about childhood nightmares. sad but true sounds like machinery falling down an elevator shaft. wherever i may roam opens with a sitar like sound before becoming six and a half minutes of wandering metal existentialism. the unforgiven is practically a western performed by men who own significantly more distortion pedals than horses.

then there’s nothing else matters.

the archivist. james, that one must have scared the shit out of you.

james. yeah.

the archivist. because it’s personal.

james. that’s probably why.

the archivist. metallica fans will accept nuclear war, insanity, execution, biblical plagues, whatever. but feelings.

kirk laughs.

kirk. that’s where they draw the line.

james smiles despite himself.

the joke hides something important. hetfield’s writing really was changing. rock later described the black album sessions as a breakthrough for james as a songwriter, particularly in learning that personal writing could still connect universally. 

and that’s probably one of the reasons this thing became enormous.

metallica stopped writing exclusively outward.

they started looking inward.

then they turned the amplifiers up.

the archivist. kirk, what’s success actually changed.

kirk. everything around the music gets bigger. more people. more interviews. bigger venues. more expectations. but when you’re actually playing guitar, you’re still trying to play the song right.

the archivist. that’s disappointingly sensible.

kirk. sorry.

the archivist. jason.

jason. louder crowds.

the archivist. finally somebody understands journalism.

the backstage hallway is getting busier. somebody needs somebody somewhere immediately. road cases move past. crew members communicate in the strange shorthand of people responsible for transporting a small industrial civilization across continents.

metallica have become a corporation almost despite themselves.

but somewhere underneath all this machinery are still four guys who grew up worshipping records.

hetfield was still talking enthusiastically about those roots in 1992. in an interview with black sabbath guitarist tony iommi that year, he remembered discovering sabbath through his brother’s record collection and being overwhelmed by how brutally heavy they sounded. 

now another generation is doing exactly that with metallica.

that’s the part nobody can calculate on a sales report.

some thirteen year old is hearing enter sandman right now.

then he’ll find master of puppets.

then ride the lightning.

then he’ll discover diamond head.

then motorhead.

then black sabbath.

and suddenly one enormously successful record has become a trapdoor into forty years of heavy music.

that’s how this shit works.

the archivist. last question. you’re standing near the top of the mountain now. what happens if this disappears.

there’s finally a pause.

lars answers first.

lars. then we make another record.

james nods.

james. that’s what we’re here for.

the archivist. not being famous.

james. no.

the archivist. good. because fame has a terrible fucking discography.

james laughs.

somebody calls the band.

not long afterward they’ll walk toward another stage and another ocean of people. the lights will die. the crowd will erupt. that enormous opening riff will start crawling through the building.

and for a few hours the argument about selling out won’t matter.

because 1992 metallica presents one of rock’s favorite uncomfortable truths.

sometimes the underground doesn’t get destroyed by the mainstream.

sometimes it gets so fucking enormous that the mainstream has to move over.

and somewhere backstage, the archivist closes his notebook while twenty thousand people begin screaming.

not bad for a bunch of guys radio supposedly didn’t need.

source material

• Metallica. Metallica. Elektra Records, 1991.
• Metallica. A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica. Elektra Entertainment, 1992.
• Hetfield, James, and Tony Iommi. Interview. Guitar World, August 1992.
• MTV Headbangers Ball. Metallica interviews and tour coverage, 1992.
• Metallica. Wherever We May Roam Tour, 1991–1992.
• Rock, Bob. Interviews concerning the recording of Metallica and working with the band.