Fever: How Rock 'n' Roll Transformed Gender in America

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Preface

1. Are You Lonesome Tonight?

2. Chains

3. Private Dancer

4. I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself

5. Man Overboard

6. Walk Like a Man

7. Double Fantasies

Discography

Bibliography

Permissions

Acknowledgments

Index

Also by Tim Riley

Copyright

To my mother, Nancy Grace Druding Riley:

Flying Colors skipper, University of Colorado English teacher,

opera and ballet buff, enthusiastic alto,

ukulele maestro, memoirist, MSW,

and amateur critic

And to my boys, Moses and Adam,

who have forgotten more about manhood than I’ll ever know;

my sisters, Jenny and Ann, women of the world;

my stepfather, Dr. Conrad Riley, who helped out

more than he realizes;

and my wife and hero, Sara Laschever:

Petticoat Junction

PREFACE

The second half of the twentieth century, we are told, suffered from a dearth of heroes. From statesmen (John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton) to sports stars (Joe DiMaggio, Daryl Strawberry, O.J. Simpson) to warriors (the entire military-industrial complex responsible for Vietnam, the crooked 2000 presidential election, and the security breakdown behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks), disillusion reigns. Young men, in particular, have supposedly been forced to struggle into manhood without any positive role models. Iron John, by Robert Bly, Stiffs, by Susan Faludi, Real Boys, by William S. Pollack, all best-sellers, were built on this thesis.

This observation mystifies me. What about rock ’n’ roll? What about rock ’n’ roll’s role models? The boomers born after World War II, both men and women, learned much of what they know about how to be young, how to seek and earn love, and how to struggle toward adulthood from the popular music they listened to. When a figure as compelling as Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes sang Be My Baby in 1963, it expressed the power and sweetness of female desire without shame or false coyness. Women rockers such as Tina Turner and Chrissie Hynde made young women feel that sex was not just for bad girls and that at its best sexiness in a woman could express both strength and softness. When a band as potent as the Who made adolescent issues roar, it said to younger men, We’ve been there, we know what you’re feeling, we’re with you. Later, when Bruce Springsteen sang One Step Up, the song told both men and women, Marriage is fragile. Protect it.

Young fans who embraced rock ’n’ roll during those years absolutely saw their rock idols as models for the kinds of men and women they could choose to be if they dared. To the fans, rock stars didn’t represent what they did to establishment culture (the lawlessness and decadence of two-dimensional acts from Grand Funk Railroad to Alice Cooper to Guns N’ Roses). The best rock celebrated honesty, intimacy, and openness; it encouraged emotional expressiveness (Joni Mitchell), honored tolerance (from Boy George to Melissa Etheridge), individualism (from Bob Dylan to PJ Harvey), and social responsibility (Bonnie Raitt, U2’s Bono, Bruce Springsteen).

Rock stars helped their young fans grow from boys to men and girls to women by exploring and celebrating the nature of that struggle—the full range of sexual bewilderment, frustration, and longing (from the Who’s I Can’t Explain to Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time). Moreover, the music gave them the simultaneously liberating and frightening realization that they possessed enormous power simply because they were young. These older men and women made their younger listeners feel admired by dedicating their craft to telling their stories.

The rock stars who prospered endorsed unconventional life choices, took huge professional and artistic risks, and acted out an unfiltered appetite for experience. They depicted the world as a place waiting to be explored and enjoyed rather than as a system of tests to pass or fail, whether it was the Beatles singing Hey Jude, the Who singing Join Together, or U2 doing I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For. For these rock figures, the challenge of building an original identity, rather than accepting a received identity predicated on the values of their parents, became a necessary life passage. These were all messages listeners wanted to hear. And they are messages very much in tune with the essential American ethos that celebrates individualism, personal courage, and the nerve to explore life’s frontiers.

When Elvis Presley leapt onto the popular stage ten years after the end of World War II, shaking his hips and singing with a new gusto and tenderness about love, he shattered prevailing notions about masculinity and femininity so completely that they never recovered. In the space of a few short months in 1954–55, Presley set off a wave of psychosexual change that washed over the American consciousness, and has yet to ebb. No longer did John Wayne—strong, silent about his feelings (if he had any), and massively restrained about his sexuality—represent the American masculine ideal. Now women wanted to love Presley’s new man, and men wanted to be like Presley—warm, sensual, and openly enthusiastic about sex.

Elvis wasn’t just different from the male icons of the World War II generation that came before him. In Smiley Lewis’s One Night, he adored a completely different kind of woman than Frank Sinatra ever had, and not just in more explicit terms. When these women answered his call, they responded with completely revised notions about the men they desired. Tina Turner had her first hit in 1960 with A Fool in Love, laying out women’s answer to Presley’s challenge in under four minutes as it etched a radical new idea of womanhood, retooling rock’s formula (downtrodden lyrics sung to triumphant music) as an irrepressible feminist gauntlet. Her husband, Ike, cast her as front person to his Ike and Tina Turner Revue, but the act was subsumed by her charisma, and she commanded attention as a woman on a vastly different imaginative plane from her peers. (She beat Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique to this punch by three years.) Together, Elvis and Tina became totems of all the new ideas about gender first expressed through rock.

Take girl groups, for example. Leader of the Pack (from 1964, by the Shangri-Las) fantasizes about completely different male qualities than those sung about by fifties stars like Brenda Lee and Connie Francis. And other girl groups of the early sixties, like the Shirelles and the Cookies and especially the Ronettes, took new stances not just in the kind of man they sought, but in how they presented themselves: they were women with desire, ambition, and an aggressive beat all their own, one that rang out with new seductive appeal to men (records like the Crystals’ Girls Can Tell and Darlene Love’s Fine Fine Boy).

*   *   *

My main argument about the impact of rock ’n’ roll on our gender ideals has two parts. The first is that contrary to the fears of parents, educators, and politicians over the past fifty years, what Elvis and Tina set in motion had an overwhelmingly positive impact on its listeners. Rock ’n’ roll helped baby boomers and later generations become better parents, better partners, better friends—probably even better citizens. And it did this by addressing these themes directly in song, and indirectly through new celebrity styles, both onstage and off.

The second part of my argument is that rock’s sexual politics were way ahead of every other medium. As early as 1970, TV role models (like Mary Tyler Moore) paled in comparison to rock’s (Joni Mitchell). Rock actually helped lead the culture toward a healthier, happier paradigm of male-female relations, one in which men can acknowledge, even enjoy, their emotions and feel confident enough to talk about them; one in which women can be self-confident and self-determining, as well as aggressive, angry, and independent; and one in which love is a work in progress that requires constant attention, humility, and a sense of humor. By exploring the difficulties of adult relationships in song after song, rock drove the culture toward many of these changes rather than merely recording them as they occurred.

To make this argument, I’ve selected a few key figures whose work dramatizes the changes wrought through popular music in the rock era: Elvis and Tina, girl groups, Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Joni Mitchell, Rosanne Cash, Chrissie Hynde, Deborah Harry, Bruce Springsteen, and, finally, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. These figures tell completely new stories about gender and romance than those their parents did, and their views intriguingly overlap to create a larger narrative about the gender upheavals that their listeners lived through.

Of course, there are quite a few rock figures who remain unexamined here: Elton John was the first to go from self-consciously asexual to bisexual in a notorious 1976 Rolling Stone interview (and the release of Blue Moves, an early chink in his wall of hits), but his music reflected little of this. In fact, most pop stars associated with androgyny and gender tricks used such ploys more as marketing tools than as thematic subjects: David Bowie’s androgyny did more for rock fashion than for gay rights; Boy George paraded around as rock’s first bisexual (eunuch?), standing on Elton’s shoulders, but failed to sustain a longer story line. It took Rod Stewart, by then a parody of a macho womanizer, singing The Killing of Georgie in 1977, for an explicitly gay story to hit the top forty.

From the female perspective, in a single song, 1967’s Respect, Aretha Franklin funneled civil rights energy into a towering new feminist anthem. Janis Joplin updated the blues as an intensely female cry that confronted rock’s lingering macho codes. Sinéad O’Connor’s radically shaved head may have punctuated her Catholic dissent politics, but it never diminished her music’s sex appeal. Rap and hip-hop culture has its own stories concerning absent fathers, tough-and-tender women like Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliot, the value of long-term relationships, and the ongoing scourge of misogyny, machismo, and homophobia. Elvis and Tina, however, built new rock monuments to Male and Female, and they still frame the way we think about gender ideals.

Ultimately, this book is about how rock influenced everybody’s ideas about gender in the decades since Elvis and Tina first broke Hollywood’s spell to enact what it means to be a man and a woman in the rock era. Rock’s compressed, three-minute radio jolts expressed the fears, desires, obsessions, and thrills of ideal lovers, and in the process, changed our society in profound yet largely unrecognized ways. The story of rock has been told as a story about race; as a tale of intergenerational conflict; as a saga of class triumph and regional vitality. The story I want to tell is different: it’s a story about how rock songs both bombastic and delicate rang out with new spins on tired macho stereotypes and emergent feminism; about how rock idealizes, chases, and romances the opposite sex; and about how new men and women stormed the world’s stages, transforming gender ideas even more decisively than they changed attitudes toward race, class, and fashion.

CHAPTER 1

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

The rock ’n’ roll revolution in our ideas about manhood begins—as so much in rock begins—with Elvis Presley. Presley released his first single, That’s All Right, Mama, a cover of an Arthur Crudup blues side, in July of 1954. Just two months earlier, the Supreme Court had handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a ruling that would begin to transform America’s racial landscape. The two events have become symbolically linked: imagine the legal and emotional surge of change that rippled through the Bible Belt. Blacks and whites didn’t even go to school together yet in the preintegrated South, making it doubly shocking for people to see Elvis swivel his hips and moan in direct imitation of male and female R&B shouters like Wynonie Harris and Big Mama Thornton. Initially, Presley’s race stylings and class come-uppance upstaged his gender mingling.

The very idea that a white boy could sing a black man’s song, or adopt a black woman’s sexual bravado, with such gusto, cracked the fifties—maybe the whole of twentieth-century American life—in half. And central to that style of singing was a frank and earthy enthusiasm for sex and an unabashed physical expression of its pleasures. At this remove, it’s hard to say which scandalized middle-class white parents more—Presley’s black vocal mannerisms, his vigorous shaking off of the personal restraints of his parents’ generation, or his sexual expressiveness. But in the years since, historians and social critics have focused on the first two—Presley’s mainstreaming of black singing styles and the generational revolt rock ’n’ roll portrayed. That Presley anticipated this cultural sea change with a dash of eccentric, self-deprecating humor conveys only part of his protean musical imagination.

The other great theme of Elvis Presley’s music—the way he completely reimagined male behavior and, by extension, what women desired in men—has been largely overlooked. To be sure, the other aspects of his revolt were more immediate and pressing: the racial conflict of the time and the boomers’ demographic bulge tended to accent these matters first. But it’s also because Presley was so successful that our minds rarely glance back to a time when men were forbidden such self-expression.

Where the reigning American male ideal of the middle 1950s, John Wayne, rarely exhibited excitement about anything, and eschewed all expressions of weakness or vulnerability, Presley openly shivered with the thrill women gave him, groaned with the force of his desire, pleaded for love without embarrassment, and personified romantic exuberance. In songs such as Any Way You Want Me, Love Me, and Love Me Tender, he guilelessly paraded gentleness, desperation, and emotional hunger and intimated, to his elders’ horror, that One Night of illicit love might be worth any price he had to pay the morning after.

Presley’s charisma pointed toward what the new ideal man would be in the modern era, from the ease with which he handled technological wonders to the humble-irreverent way he accepted the untold riches his music won for him. This new style of manhood established adolescent fun, risk-taking, and sexual exploration as positive values in themselves as well as necessary pathways toward adulthood. It also made manifest an intense identification with forbidden pleasures. In addition, Presley reshaped notions about what kind of woman this new man might desire, and how much he might expect from any romantic life he imagined for himself—a life very different from what his parents had raised him to expect. Beyond all this, Presley invented an open-ended idea of manhood: with such a personal sense of style, mere imitation missed the mark; the point was to cultivate your own idiosyncrasies with a sense of humor. His metaphors of freedom touched men in all kinds of different ways and set off wild, unpredictable responses. Before long, all kinds of different men would use Presley’s model of self-realization to express many different kinds of manhood.

*   *   *

John Wayne was such a powerful icon that by the 1950s he seemed to move and speak like an archetype. He inhabited his manhood unselfconsciously. That’s why, in a way, viewers stopped expecting him to act—he simply had to be. He filled the screen role of a necessarily difficult man as naturally as most actors wore clothes… David Thomson writes. He moved the way singers sing, with huge confidence and daring. Wayne’s hyperconfident gait was parodied by director Mike Nichols in The Birdcage (1996) when he had Robin Williams coach Nathan Lane on how to be straight by walking like Wayne—it only played up how openly gay Lane’s character was, and how regressive the macho ideal was to a drag queen.

At least half of Wayne’s appeal was the seeming grace he brought to his persona: he didn’t seem to try to personify a new definition of a man, he simply reflected the gender code of his age as imperiously as Katharine Hepburn or Barbara Stanwyck or Deborah Kerr reflected that code for women. And the Wayne archetype was an umbrella to a host of variations in Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, and later, Nick Nolte (not to mention fictional giants like Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe). These men exuded control in all they undertook, were certain of their powers, mistrustful of women, and decidedly unemotional. Of course, nice guys like Henry Fonda and Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper modified Wayne’s ideas, but cast in westerns they were usually required to test themselves against the same hard realities Wayne did. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), director John Ford had Wayne and Stewart explicitly act this tension out, and Wayne’s ghostly heroism is all but a foregone conclusion: Stewart, the lawman, the man of books and ideas, doesn’t stand a chance against Lee Marvin’s villain. The picture’s premise presumes Wayne’s code as superior to Stewart’s (while, at the same time, it prefigures the disappearance of the Wayne archetype).

Once Wayne got a handle on his persona (by about the time he starred in Ford’s Stagecoach, 1939), the typical Wayne character didn’t strive toward an ideal manhood—he was already there. Rather, he acted from an imperturbably secure center, responding to events that only sharpened some long-standing resolution. Wayne’s western persona was soon inseparable from his status as Cold War gladiator, the larger-than-life mascot for a war fought on psychic battlefields. He sheriffed the small town of American ideals (and prosperity) on the nuclear frontier, before vigilantism became an epithet. And he came to this code from some conflict that was long since buried; the code was the end result, its formation was secondary. This ethic was alive and active in the male ruling class of the mid-twentieth century, both onscreen and in the imaginations of those who paid to watch him in the dark.

In the contrast between Wayne and Presley, there’s a tangle of father-son emotions getting played out that’s no less fraught than those between any real authoritarian father and his hell-raising son. Along with Frank Sinatra, Wayne was part of the older generation who bemoaned the rise of Elvis Presley and his music, dubbing it music for goons. But this defensiveness illustrates not only how much Presley had to revolt against, but how intimidating that revolt was.

Wayne’s code of male behavior is inseparable from that formed by World War II. Barely ten years after American boys (not men) stormed the beaches at Normandy, the human cost of the war and its aftermath was not carried lightly. It was as if the cold-war curtain came down both across Europe and across some imaginary field in the American male psyche that held men in check, taught them to beware, be cautious, ignore the subconscious, and clamp down hard on the American virtues and liberties so many good people had died to preserve. (Wayne’s sudden, random death in 1949’s Sands of Two Jima may have been intended to put the absolutes of wartime attitudes to rest, but it only canonized them.)

The nonverbal aspect of the World War II macho code is worth stressing. John Wayne’s silences were far more dramatic than his line readings. The Red scare and the McCarthy hearings fed this temperament; talking could literally ruin your life and the lives of your friends. To show one’s feelings openly in combat situations, or differ from mainstream opinions in politics and public life, was weakness, and potentially dangerous. Since many of Wayne’s later cowboy movies work as cold-war allegories, his code automatically had political overtones. It took Hollywood over fifty years, until Saving Private Ryan (1998), to show images of men openly crying for their mothers amidst the bloody waves at Normandy.

*   *   *

Wayne’s perceived power and aura of control are of a piece with his restraint—the aspect of deep, conflicting feelings that are as large and vital as his face is glum and stodgy. In fact, if you watch Stagecoach next to Liberty Valance, you get an idea of how much charm Wayne discarded as so much personality baggage. Wayne’s charm is built on strength at the expense of humor, and his characters less often seek out pleasure, ponder enjoying life, play pranks because they’re simply worth playing, or have fun for its own sake—rather it’s usually at the expense of tearing down somebody else’s pride. In Liberty Valance, Wayne shoots a bucket of paint above Jimmy Stewart’s head to mock Stewart’s genteel law training as petty thought in the face of decisive action. Wayne’s characters are motivated by vengeance and sadism; their temperaments are easily stirred toward anger and irritation; and when they’re making moral decisions, there is no revelation of feeling through eyes, face, or even a horse rider’s lope. All emotional life is hidden, smothered beneath a certitude meant to convey an intimidating grandiosity.

And, ironically perhaps, a central element of Wayne’s persona was, as it was with Elvis, the way he carried himself and the way he moved his body. As Garry Wills explains: