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"On
stage I make love to 25,000 people, and then I go home alone." So
asserted Janis Joplin, Port
Arthur native and rock' n' roll icon. "Ball and Chain." "Piece
of My Heart." "Me and Bobby McGee." A truly incredible performer
but a troubled, tragic figure. Joplin is just one of the musicians
expertly profiled in this impressive anthology. Deftly edited by
Lethem and Dettmar and published by the esteemed Library of America,
Shake It Up deserves a prominent place on the bookshelf of
any serious music fan.
This commendable anthology features many giants of rock and pop
criticism, including Gina Arnold, Lester Bangs, Stanley Booth, Robert
Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Peter Guralnick, Dave Marsh, Richard
Meltzer, Paul Nelson, Robert Palmer, Ann Powers, Lillian Roxon,
Ellen Sander, Greg Tate, Nick Tosches, Paul Williams, and Ellen
Willis. Most of the legendary artists appear in this extraordinary
compilation: the Beach Boys, the Beatles, David Bowie, James Brown,
Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson,
Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, Prince, the
Ramones, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones, Axl Rose, and numerous
others. Among the genres analyzed are R&B, disco, heavy metal, and
emo. The selections cover half a century of rock and pop; Shake
It Up opens with Nat Hentoff's 1963 liner notes for The Freewheelin'
Bob Dylan LP and concludes with Greil Marcus's 2014 essay, "Guitar
Drag."
To obtain a feeling for these insightful, opinionated and splendidly
written pieces (which, in my view, certainly qualify as literature)
consider the following three excerpts:
Jules Siegel, "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God!" (1967): Earlier
in the summer, Brian [Wilson] had hired Van Dyke Parks, a super-sophisticated
young songwriter and composer, to collaborate with him on the lyrics
for Smile. With Van Dyke working for him, he had a fighting
chance against John Lennon, whose literary skill and Liverpudlian
wit had been one of the most important factors in making the Beatles
the darlings of the hip intelligentsia…As 1967 opened it seemed
as though Brian and the Beach Boys were assured of a new world of
success; yet something was going wrong. As the corporate activity
reached a peak of intensity, Brian was becoming less and less productive
and more and more erratic. Smile, which was to have been
released for the Christmas season, remained unfinished.
Chuck Eddy, "The Ramones" (1990): So was punk rock really
new? Who knows! The Ramones combined old stuff, mainly power chords
and bubblegum-surfboard harmonies, but they did it in a brand new
way…In Ramones rock, there was no respite, no let-up; the slightest
change-a hand clap, a falsetto, an echo, a three-second Farfisa
or a twenty-second guitar solo-felt cataclysmic.
Devin McKinney, Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History
(2003): Like most Americans, Charles Manson discovered the Beatles
in the spring of 1964. Unlike most Americans, he was in prison-specifically
the U. S. Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington State, where
he'd been incarcerated since June 1961. He may have seen the Beatles'
picture in Life magazine, or heard their voices coming from a transistor
radio. Instantly, he was excited by them. Some said obsessed. One
of his friends, the legendary Alvin "Creepy" Karpis-in the '30s
a member of Ma Barker's gang, now the fellow inmate who taught Manson
guitar-said later, "He was constantly telling people he could come
on like the Beatles, if he got the chance."
In short, the fifty selections in Shake It Up represent rock
and pop criticism at its absolute finest. To quote Joan Jett & the
Blackhearts, "I love rock' n' roll, so put another dime in the juke
box, baby."
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