Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music by Ellen Willis

Author:Ellen Willis [Willis, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452931722
Publisher: University Press of Minnesota
Published: 2011-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

Into the Seventies, for Real

DECEMBER 1972

It’s a few long weeks after Nixon’s landslide and I’m sitting home listening to albums by Five Dollar Shoes, a local product, and the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils, a bunch of rock-and-roll crazies from Berkeley. If the sixties as a cultural unit can be said to have ended with Altamont, the deaths of Hendrix and Joplin, or the collapse of the peace movement (choose one), I think the seventies can be said to have begun with this election. Rock-and-roll fans are already beginning to launch an antisixties backlash that parallels (or parodies) the Nixon victory. It incorporates the standard grievances about musical-poetical-political pretension’s crowding out fun and noise, but goes further. As Rockin’ Ron Weiser puts it in a fanzine called Flash, “Then we got the Beatles … look at these phony jerks wearingTIES andSUITS and really clean-cut looking … and singing songs about ‘Wanting to Hold Your Hand’!!!” He also accuses the Stones of ripping off Chuck Berry. The rest of the magazine is less extreme but still abounds in withering references to “doped-out dullards,” tea-drinking, crumpet-eating Britishers, and peace-loving hippies. Nor is this mood confined to cultists. Turn to Rolling Stone and there’s Nick Tosches agreeing “that eating … is more fun than spiritual introspection; that sex and violence and stuff like that are more vital than cosmic awareness.”

You get the idea. We’re supposed to get back to the mythic crudity and crassness reputed to be at the heart of rock and roll before it was corrupted by meaning, sensitivity, taste, and the like. The aestheticians of the backlash may overlap with the fifties-R&B nuts we’ve always had with us, but in general they take the spirit rather than the sound of fifties rock as their inspiration—particularly the Dionysiac illiteracy of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. Punk-rock has become the favored term of endearment. I have mixed feelings about all this. For one thing, the blood-’n’-raunch-forever approach to rock tends to degenerate into a virility cult. Besides, having lived through the fifties, I find it impossible to romanticize them. In spite of rock and roll, they were dull, mean years—at least for middle-class high-school girls. For all the absurdities of the counterculture, it was better than what we had before; there’s something to be said for a little cosmic awareness, provided it doesn’t get out of hand. And if it hadn’t been for the Beatles (I wonder, did Rockin’ Ron despise Buddy Holly for wearing suits and glasses and looking like a schoolteacher?) we might never have developed the kind of consciousness about our shared past that allows a rag like Flash to exist. Still, I do have a weakness for dedicated crudity and crassness, and so I’ve been digging these two backlashy bands, Five Dollar Shoes and the Hoodoo Rhythm Devils.

On Thanksgiving weekend, I saw Five Dollar Shoes at the Mercer Arts Center’s Oscar Wilde Room—which may yet become New York’s revenge on San Francisco—and was impressed. The group combines an unmistakably

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