History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs Read Online Free PDF

back to that night, when by his count he’d been one of forty-two people in the crowd:
Bloody hell, it’s Stepping Stone. And in the next sixty seconds, hearing the Pistols violently murder and then resurrect this simple pop classic, all was made clear as all was destroyed. Only in hearing the old was the new revealed. I will destroy the temple and in three minutes I will rebuild it, sayeth the Lord, sayeth Johnny Rotten. Clarity for the one academic arsehole in the audience. The tune, the song, the lyrics, the beat of this Monkees gem were assailed with utter confidence, utter anger. In its complete indifference to the niceties of technique and respect, they restored to the popular song the spirit that is the only fucking reason it exists in the first place. Robert Johnson sold his soul at the crossroads. He sold it for this. Good deal.
    Two of the people there were Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner. “I saw the Sex Pistols,” Sumner would say. “Theywere terrible. I wanted to get up and be terrible, too.” They pledged themselves as a band that night; their first name was Stiff Little Kittens. Curtis, who Hook and Sumner had met at a second Manchester Sex Pistols show two weeks later, answered a singer wanted ad they put up at Virgin Records. They changed the name to Warsaw. Running through various drummers until they found Morris, they were an indistinguishable punk band, trying to be frantic, reaching for a screech (“‘Yeah yeah yeah yeah fuck off fuck off,’” as Sumner would sum it up), more than that reaching for a no that they themselves could believe, even if they couldn’t get anyone else to believe it. In 1978 they found it. “We were doing a soundcheck at the Mayflower, in May,” Hook said in 2007, “and we played ‘Transmission’: people had been moving around, and they all stopped to listen. I was thinking, what’s the matter with that lot? That’s when I realized that was our first great song.” “Now, finally, he understood the straightforward filter in his head,” said Tony Wilson, who founded Factory Records for Joy Division and other Manchester bands.
He had chosen artists who “meant it.” More than meant it. Had no choice. The stuff was forcing itself up and out of their psyches whether they fucking liked it or not. 99.99% of bands are on stage ’cause they want to be in the music business, they want to be on Top of the Pops, they want to be rock and roll stars. The very few are on stage because they have absolutely no fucking choice. Whatever is demanding to be expressed pushes them forward. No choice. And that night Warsaw had no choice but to be up there playing this searing music.
    “None of us were interested in any kind of achievement, in a success, celebrity form, or money,” Peter Hook said in 2013. “It was the drive to play. Just to be heard.”
    “The unearned euphoria of Henderson the Rain King; the shapeless piety of A Fable; the sentimental self-indulgence of Across the River and into the Trees; the maudlin falsity of The Town; the heavy-handed symbolism and religiosity of The Old Man and the Sea, destined from its inception for the pages of Life —such failures make over and over the point that the contemporary American writer can abjure negativism only if he is willing to sacrifice truth and art,” Leslie Fiedler wrote in 1960, in the introduction to No! In Thunder.
For major novelists and minor, the pursuit of the positive means stylistic suicide. Language itself decays, and dialogue becomes travesty; character, stereotype; insight, sentiment. The Nobel Prize speech destined for high-school anthologies requires quite another talent from that demanded by the novel; and the abstract praise of love requires another voice from that which cries No! to the most noble temptations, the most defensible lies.
Yet one must not forget, in the face of their recent decline, the success of Bellow and Hemingway and Faulkner: the terrible impact of The Victim, The Sun Also Rises