Red Earth & Rust

INNOCENCE

The songs I seek out and return to tend to have more than a little darkness in them. It’s not that I’m particularly melancholic; it’s just that the airwaves seem to be dominated by songs that don’t tell the whole story about who we are. I can tap my feet to them, but my mind is elsewhere.

And yet rock ‘n’ roll started out as an expression of visceral energy that had no intellectual pretensions to speak of. Dylan might have incorporated elements from Rimbaud and Dostoevsky into his voice, but his original inspiration came from Little Richard. Perhaps my favourite song about rock ‘n’ roll is the Velvet Underground song more or less named after it, in which a woman named Jenny remembers her first exposure to the music at the age of five, when she turned on a New York station one day and discovered that “in spite of the computations / You could just dance to the rock ‘n’ roll station / And it was allright.”

Sometimes I find songs that are infectious with a kind of undiluted joy, an innocent fun. Teenage Kicks, a 1978 song by the northern Irish punk band the Undertones, is such a song. The words are unremarkable in themselves, but they come across with exuberant conviction, and the music is irresistible. BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who devoted a lifetime to listening to and promoting adventurous music of all kinds, liked it so much that he named it his all-time favourite song, and requested that nothing should be written on his tombstone except his name and the first line from its lyric: “Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.” If this surprises you, go and listen to it on YouTube: I often do, and I’m never disappointed.

Then there is the haunting After Hours from the Velvet Underground’s self-titled third album. Elsewhere on this record Lou Reed, the band’s main songwriter, sings in an uncharacteristically gentle, vibrato-less voice, but After Hours takes this one step further. It is a song of seduction that comes as a complete surprise from such a worldly outfit. Sung slightly off key by the band’s drummer, Maureen Tucker, it starts with her saying “one, two, three” in a childlike, untutored voice, as if she wants us to sing along, or maybe establish a tempo. The singer promises fidelity to someone on condition he/she closes the door so she won’t have to go out into the grey world any more: “All the people are dancing / And they’re having such fun / I wish it could happen to me / But if you close the door / I’d never have to see the day again.”

This is a very different kind of innocence from that expressed in Teenage Kicks. There are indications that the longed-for escape from the grey world is unlikely: “Oh, one day I know / Someone will look into my eyes / And say hello / You’re my very special one”, Tucker sings, and the forlorn echo on “hello” suggests that at least for the moment rescue is not at hand. The beauty of the song lies in this contradiction: this is an innocence with a lot of experience already behind it, yet willing to make promises, to close its eyes again.

SURVIVAL

“Bruce Berry was a working man / He used to load that Econoline van. / A sparkle was in his eye / But his life was in his hands.”

So begins Tonight’s the Night, the title track of Neil Young’s harrowing 1975 masterpiece. It is dedicated to a roadie who died of an overdose while traveling with Young and his band.

There had been earlier references in Young’s songs to the cost of life on the road, most famously in The Needle and the Damage Done, but he had never explored the relationship between creativity and self-destructiveness at such depth. The thing about Berry that counts most to Young is his edgy intensity: “Well, late at night / When the people were gone / He used to pick up my guitar / And sing a song in a shaky voice / That was real as the day was long.” But Young also shudders at Berry’s death, placing the song on the edge between celebration and lament.

In spite of this shudder, Young has revisited and validated fiery intensity many times across his long career, perhaps most famously in the track that both opens and closes 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, first in an intimately acoustic version, then as an electric anthem of the kind only Young can pull off.

My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue) seems at first glance like a simple celebration of rock ‘n’ roll’s ability to survive: “My my, hey hey / Rock and roll is here to stay.” The tension is clear in the next two lines, though: “It’s better to burn out / Than to fade away …”

These lines have haunted the subsequent history of rock ‘n’ roll, particularly because of being quoted in Kurt Cobain’s famous suicide note – as if they could explain his decision to end his own life. Again, two verses further into the song, he sings: “It’s better to burn out / Than it is to rust …”

Less often remembered is another line from the same song: “And once you’re gone you can’t ever come back.” The message is clear: rock survives because it can reinvent itself, thus renewing the Protean, rebellious energy at its core. We, on the other hand, do not. Whether we are artists, listeners or both, life will be too much for us sooner or later.

Rock has always mythologised the brief, turbulent lives of its practitioners. These casualties serve as metaphors for intensity and suffering in the midst of an indifferent or hostile world. It is ironic in this context that Young, like Dylan, has survived and remained (though intermittently) a vital influence on the music of the generations that have succeeded him.

Of course such survival has its own risks – stagnation, nostalgia, the long twilight of mediocrity. But it also carries in it the potential of renewal against the odds, and Young’s career, with all its high and low points, stands as a testament to this. Long may he run.