Rock 'n Roll Sometimes Forgets

YES LITTLE BOY, they will even sell you pleasure. Beware your senses, for they will market them and seduce you with their product, and you will find (once you've paid for it) that it is empty--empty and shallow and disingenuous enough to make America sick for a thousand years.

Remember when they hated rock'n'roll? The cameras couldn't see Elvis from the waist down, and parents stood guard in the doorway of their children's vicarious ecstasy. Time has seen rock'n'roll co-opted, legitimized by anal retentive businessmen who learned how to turn the tide of rebellion into a tide of profits--to conceptualize, to market, to package, to target, to sell.

But it's only rock'n'roll, and God knows who invented it. Bursting out of many minds and souls, rock was a feeling embodied and cultivated by a frying countryful of unbearably frenetic, alienated souls. Only a matter of time before the hungry wolves get the urge to cry out on a dry night, oh, Jack London, if only you could have seen it.

Ed Sullivan and his cameras saw a cash crop of bop sweating teenagers making all kinds of marketable noises. The money people record the noises and sell them back to their creators.

But Ed Sullivan's camera showed me real people for the first time; real people crying and laughing at the same time with mass outbursts of all their excitement and it was Absolute Reality: hair being torn from the roots, cops being ruffled, clothes ripped from backs as souvenirs, runaways jumping from roofs, a teardrop on the still asphalt upon which heroes had just trodden, and the helicopter took them back to studioland. The music was the reality, at a time when not even the ongoing war could captivate and stir so many of its sufferers until years after the music itself had arrived--and why, why, why?

Ten years and countless albums and groups later, I feel so twisted, so confused and maze-mad; "Rock'n'Roll Nigger" Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed slip through the rock world of packaging-marketing-publicity and make me want to tear down buildings like I did when I first heard The Who and The Stones (but their music--ah, the beauty of it--consumed that urge).

But for the most part, the anal-retentives have learned to control their product pretty well and so they throw this Kansas-Eagles spaceshit in my face and tell me to mellow out and "get into it," or dis-co-here-dis-co-there tell me to dance, and they even tell me how to dance. Too many commercial smiles in 1978, not enough clenched teeth and sweating brows.

HERE IS WISDOM: beware of harmless-sounding words: "registration," "hourly," "transit," "camp," and above all (if you are a writer)--"PROMOTION," "PRESS RELEASE," "URGENT--FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE."

This particular press kit heralded the homecoming promotion of Peter C. Johnson, whose first album, Unique, is being released on A&M records. A&M was holding the promo event at the Garden Gym, a time-worn boxing gym next to the Boston Garden.

"Peter's music is--it's just unique, you can't describe it, you'll have to hear it. And to symbolize his uniqueness, we're holding this gig at unique places around the country--you know, places you wouldn't expect to hold rock'n'roll promos," his starry-eyed press agent said from behind her intense lipstick and boots up to here.

They promoted him at a gay bar in Atlanta, at a recording studio in New York City--unique places. The sidebar to this promo trip--which included a catered buffet and booze and whatever quaaludes, reds and vals you could cop from the local rockies--was a brief look at amateur female boxing champ "Cat" Davis.

I really wanted to see the female boxing. But when I arrived I found out it was the last attraction of the evening. Johnson set up his P.A.s amidst odd mannequins and a tapedeck which backed up his vocals. The boxing ring was 20 feet in front of him, and the mingling rock press and refreshment bar was just beyond the ring.

The caterers had prepared frightening 15-foot heroes, every kind of salad and cold casserole. Grilled hot dogs and hamburgers smoked the rafters. Moving flashing black leathers, chic corduroys and boots, tight female leather pants--and some were even "punked out" in this old ratty gym.

"I really like Peter...you know, it's like, I like people like Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell--but Joni and Hendrix have a lot in common, they really do. They both go up there and do it their own way, do their own thing, you know? Really unique," one locally popular folksinger explained to me.

And one of his groupies (with stars an her cheeks and safety pins in her cuffs) added: "Oh man, I can get into his shit sometimes but shit, he's just so fuckin' cooooool, you hear? A flying asshole, a real tease..."

Made-up eyes stare away from each other over superficial sights in the general emptiness. They're wearing lapel pins that say "unique." The starry-eyed press agent is admiring Peter from afar and stalking him with a Nikon. "This is a really big one for him," she said, "he's coming back to his home."

Johnson runs through a few of his vocals, flipping on his deck which plays--among sax and acoustic and electric guitars and bass--a mechanical percussion line. "Radiator," he says airily into the mike.

He's just testing.

THEN THE SERIOUS stuff begins, as the Boston rock press and assorted groupies from punks to spaceshots gather between the boxing ring and Peter, who starts, "Oh wow, man, look at this...looks like I'm back home...(wriggles back, sticks out his tongue and rolls his hollow eyeballs out from a thin, benny-worn face) spaced out again, huh..."

He started into "Snowblind," a cut off his new album.

"Elevator.........Ra---diator." The mannequins next to the stageset gazed lifelessly on a bunch of variously dissheveled rockies doing, en masse, their Keith Richards imitations, getting into it, encased by the cracked plaster of a boxing gym and the boxing posters (from Marciano to Frazier) which marked the time-honored Garden Gym. The "Snow...blind." The smoke drifted over from the grille, covering liquor breaths and camera clarity. Johnson led into some other songs behind his tapeband including "Catch a Fallen Star," the most impressive of the bunch. He spaced-out Lou Reed's "Pale Blue Eyes" (a testimonial to Hank Williams, also done by Patti Smith), leaving its tribute as poignant as novocaine.

Narcotic spaceshot put-ons in the memory of great rock'n'roll continued with "Sandman"--another song spaced into lost perception. And finally, oh finally, "Cat" Davis came jogging through the gym, stripped of her warm-up and donning her Everlast gloves. I was expecting, something like a roller derby queen, but the "Cat" was very real. She was beautiful, to begin with--in peak athletic condition with tight, firm skin and muscles; a cute, but tomboyish face under a flock of long, curly blonde hair. Her sparring partner was a short, pudgy guy--and they just goofed around for a few minutes until he plugged her good, perhaps by accident. Her smiles, those of an innocent outsider admiring the strangeness of it all, fled completely under the blow of Absolute Reality, the night's first genuine emotion. Crank time.

Her expression turned to one of total seriousness, her own pride stretching to its grittiest with the extension of her jab, and another, backing her sparring partner (who maintained the most tolerant of all smiles) into a corner, jab, jab, thump. "Beat the shit out of "em" a punk yelled. And she split before she could get too serious.

The crowd, shut up for the first time that evening by honest respect and interest, rolled back into chatter and some clowned on the mat for pictures, gorilla suits and numerous show-biz kids taking pictures of themselves.

The whole boatload of American suck'n'roll vanity and self-deprecation. "I'm a actress working as an ad receptionist." "I'm a poet working as a public relations man." Everybody on their way to being someone else somewhere else.

I followed "Cat" out the door for a breath of air--with her departure went quiet pride and confidence, a single fibre of integrity in a world of whitewash sales bargains. I have been following her since Ed Sullivan. Rock'n'Roll will just never be the same.