Sample Chapter: Neil, Young, Bruce Springsteen, and the Future of Roots

TANGLED THREADS AND GOLDEN NEEDLES

Freedom, Neil Young and various artists at the dawn of Americana
Boston Phoenix, February 9, 1990

Trading Dylan’s kinky surrealisms for pared-down language, roots rockers settled on a few self conscious themes: post-adolescent slants on girls, cars, and America; nostalgic sounds with post-nostalgic outlooks. And they held the mainstream as disco self-destructed, punk went underground, Michael Jackson booted black pop into the stratosphere and Prince kept it in orbit, metal went corporate, rap ruled the streets, the Brits rediscovered soul, Top 40 dance pop descended into drum-synthesizer hell, and the next Elvis Beatles failed to materialize (again). Dylan the poet-jester went to sleep while Dylan the pop star sleepwalked through albums and tours. Roots rock grew straight out of punk’s maniacal primitivism, shedding blistering tempos and one-note anger in favor of walking rhythms and guitar snarl as release, not weaponry.

And Reaganism made all middle-of-the-road moves seem more conservative than they actually were—any act following punk was bound to seem a bit tame. Still, it’s been a while since punk’s outburst, the last real explosion in rock, and the holding pattern of Reagan’s aftermath is bound to snap. The other influences most 80s roots types cited fell into two camps: the arty self-consciousness of the East Coast’s Velvet Underground (who were rootsy by virtue of their limited chord patterns) and the unforced fatalism of the West’s Creedence Clearwater Revival (garage rock with social overtones). With arrows darting toward the 12-string shimmer of the Byrds, and lost psychedelic treasures like the Chocolate Watch Band, the group that bridged the Creedence/ Velvets nexus was R.E.M., especially on their first three records. But R.E.M. proved to be bloated folkies (“Wendell Gee”) with an overrated sense of humor (“It’s the End of the World As We Know It”), and they spent their originality faster than a pick-up guzzles gas.

Roots rock grew straight out of punk’s maniacal primitivism, shedding blistering tempos and one-note anger in favor of walking rhythms and guitar snarl as release, not weaponry.

Since punk laid the groundwork, in form if not attitude, it’s natural that one of roots rock’s most important acts clawed its way up from punk’s ashes. In 1981, X’s Wild Gift (which is now paired on an essential CD with their first record, Los Angeles) fused punk disgust with C&Ws lyrical sense of peril (“The Once Over Twice,” “When Our Love Passed Out on the Couch”). And after the brilliant polemics of More Fun in the New World, X’s John Doe and Exene Cervenka teamed up with fellow LA rootsmeister Dave Alvin from the Blasters for a country sideshow dubbed The Knitters. (Overlooked roots masterpiece: Alvin’s Romeo’s Escape, with his own harrowing “4th of July,” X’s only hit.)

The other band to kick the movement into high gear, Jason and the Scorchers, hitched a Southern boy’s ballast with a hotdog guitarist’s regalia for Fervor (1983), an EP that interfaced C&W attitudes with metallic heat. Both X and the Scorchers shared Dylan as an axis: X with their live “Positively 4th Street” bolero (on the B-side of “4th of July”), the Scorchers with “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” which earned its status as one of the finer Dylan covers ever. After knocking on country’s door with “Louisiana Rain,”  Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers got the nod from the bard at Farm Aid and backed him up for one of Dylan’s longer creative comas. On the country side of the tracks, Ricky Scaggs and Randy Travis returned to the dobro and fiddle and got dubbed “New Traditionalists.” Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt put out a crossover blockbuster full of backwoods laments (Trio). Across the pond, punk-rock veterans the Mekons turned—poof!—into honky-tonk cynicisms and unearthed “Lost Highway” as a quietly chuckling dirge. Punk and metal alone don’t account for roots rock. The most ironic thing about the whole 80s roots story was how Bruce Springsteen, dubbed “the new Dylan” in the early 70s for his own visionary song-forms, began paring his narratives down toward Chuck Berry-esque miniatures. Darkness on the Edge of Town was a signpost, though songs like “Racing in the Street” and the title track still resembled the lengthy anthems on Born to Run.

His roots album that cast a long shadow over the decade, of course, was The River (1980) , received coolly because (a) it was not the Big Statement the bulk of its cruising songs first implied and (b) it yielded “Hungry Heart,” the most sentimental yet of his singles (his first Top 10). But The River was an omen, even if Nebraska (1982) made the Big Statement in tones too hushed to ignore. Obviously Springsteen struck a deal with his record company and promised a blockbuster on the heels of Nebraska’s predictably unsexy sales. The follow-up, Born in the U.S.A., did more than just turn Springsteen into the conquering pop hero he was always meant to be, it crystallized his audience’s will to sustain teenage excitement through adult perspectives. As irreproachable as this idea was, it didn’t attach itself to anything especially topical. After all, Nebraska was a calculated look at Reaganism’s effect on the underclass. Even the title track’s Vietnam-vet theme wasn’t pegged to any specific incident. And by 1984, Hollywood, usually the follower of rock initiatives, had been milking the Vietnam saga for at least five years (Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now). But that didn’t make Born in the U.S.A.’s songs any less good, or the album any less great (many of the tracks were recorded during the Nebraska sessions). “Darlington County,” about a night out with a buddy who winds up “handcuffed to the bumper of a state trooper’s Ford,” angled expertly off a triumphant guitar lick, and Max Weinberg’s cage-hellion drumming made all flash seem sinful. This was a conservative, nostalgic sound, all right, but the glances back toward youth (“Glory Days,” “My Hometown”) defined a roots attitude that made getting older and dealing with adult responsibilities seem part of a larger rock experience that outreached pining for the good old days.

What would the next Beatles sound like, anyway—inspired amalgamators who balance pop with punk with psychedelia with rap with world beat with something completely new?

Springsteen wasn’t just a symbol for the roots movement, he was an embarrassment of riches. He wrote “Fire” for rockabilly singer Robert Gordon (even though the cruise-control mix by the Pointer Sisters took it to hit radio), and “Because the Night” with Patti Smith, around the same time she covered the Byrds’ “So You Wanna Be a Rock’n’Roll Star.” Born in the U.S.A. was an instant mainstream totem, one lined with wall-to-wall hit singles. Before you knew it, underground roots rock turned fashionable: California’s Long Ryders (whose leader, Sid Griffin, wrote a biography of former Byrd and Flying Burrito Brother Gram Parsons), Boston’s pre-Miller-ad Del Fuegos (who have finally rediscovered their former spark on their latest, and first for RCA, Smoking in the Fields). Best of all were Minnesota’s Replacements, who, despite all odds, including themselves, turned their raspy, hardcore basement beer jags into spry and scabrous rock with Let It Be (1984). “Sixteen Blue” remains a knowing reflection on teen angst, an older brother’s consolation. Their cover of Kiss’s “Black Diamond” showed that metal cartoons could transcend hardcore target practice. “Unsatisfied” transcended itself. (The band’s major-label efforts—Tim, Pleased To Meet Me, and last year’s would-be breakthrough, Don’t Tell a Soul—all sustain Let It Be’s virtues.) Springsteen’s longevity is part of what works against him among those who begrudge pop monoliths. Neil Young has been around longer, and he claims a more telling connection to punk. Johnny Rotten revered steel brush guitar albums like 1973’s Time Fades Away, and Young returned the compliment with “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black).” But the 80s were not Young’s decade the way the 70s arguably were. He was beleaguered by his son’s birth defects and a drug problem he owned up to in “No More” and then recanted in his recent Village Voice interview. Only Hawks and Doves (1980), Reactor (1981), and Life (1986), all with longtime collaborators Crazy Horse, peel out with the screech of his best work. Old Ways, his country diversion suffers from its giddy redneck allusions, but “Misfits” remains as successfully off-the-beam as anything he’s ever done.  

Young’s recent Freedom, a violent reaction to George Bush’s CIA consciousness, is his most pungent, and by turns most accessible, album since Comes a Time (which harbored the hit “Lotta Love”). Young makes the Dylan connection just the way Springsteen does: as a prolific songwriter who (despite the Bridge tribute) remains the best interpreter of his own material. And “Rockin’ in the Free World” is the late-80s answer song to “Born in the U.S.A.,” wailing on the Reagan boom’s victims, the street-war vets who have no home to return to. The way Young transmogrifies the Drifters’ “On Broadway” with crack-cocaine tremors says more about the effects of Reaganism than Springsteen has to date. (“War,” the Edwin Starr song the Boss revived for his Live: 1975-1985 package, is token antiwar sentiment that doesn’t name names— besides, he leaves out the refrain’s sax solo, which Clarence Clemens was born to toot.) Freedom’s songs are linked by the idea of liberation—romantic quandaries circling around fear of commitment in “Hanging on a Limb,” celebrity isolation and the urge to break through in “Wrecking Ball,” and a life story that plays out the corruptive influence of rampant capitalism—the exploitive boss in “Crime in the City” casually orders up a Rolling Stone, cheeseburger and songwriter to go. So in the 80s the musicians stumped the critics (again): And roots rock, far from telling us things we already knew, allowed a lot of newer fans some time to catch up on their history as rock contemplated the middle age. Of course, the situation has only created a new climate of expectation. Roots records can’t persist into the ‘90s except as something that’s already been done to death, and the very nature of the back-to-basics mentality questions which roots bear the standard (agit-prop punkers like the Minutemen covered Creedence’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain,” thrashcore gurus Hüsker Dü maced the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” and even gloom duchess Siouxsie and her Banshees had a go at Dylan’s “This Wheel’s on Fire”).

Will the Springsteen of the ‘90s return even further in history, to R&B stomps that out-hip Chuck Berry cool with Louis Jordan sexual humor? What would the next Beatles sound like, anyway—inspired amalgamists who balance pop with punk with psychedelia with rap with world beat with something completely new? And how many Travelling Wilbury records will it take to revive Dylan’s sense of humor on his own albums? Maybe these are the wrong questions. As young himself put it, “Times fade away.” The generation that came of age in the 1980s is bound to brush ailing trends aside to gripe about its rightful place in pop history. And American roots rock will be the next pop anomaly as the post-Cold War world finds the cost of freedom.