Nik Cohn: Pop; Paul Oliver: The Story of The Blues Record Mirror, 23 August 1969 Charlie Gillett reviews two books on music: Pop by Nik Cohn, and The Story of The Blues by Paul Oliver POP HAS huge ears, a long memory and no conscience. Pop is fake feelings, done up like the real thing. Pop is industrialised happiness. Pop makes people happy. Pop is music for as many people as can be conned into liking it. Pop is what people like. Pop is the drug that stops revolution. Pop is revolution. Pop is a book by Nik Cohn. Its full title is Pop; From The Beginning, its dedicated to Jet Powers, Dean Angel and Johnny Ace, and its published by Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 238 pages for 36s. Its the best and most irritating book about pop Ive read. The book has all the qualities of pop, which has to be a compliment, but it means that it has the same effect as Radio One – keeping its audience on the brink of turning off, but coming up with something good just often enough to promise better things. Nik Cohn get genuinely excited by pop (or communicates the impression that he does), and has some effective descriptions of the rock and roll acts that have been over here. Its hard to argue his conclusion that the most exciting people to watch on stage are Little Richard and Tina Turner. NEVER BORING The book seems to have been written at one go, which is in the best pop tradition; it means there is some confusion in its organisation, but very few awkward theories or subordinate clauses to hinder the readers race across its pages. It doesnt aim to provide a lot of information, or at least wont have much to tell anybody who reads a pop music paper. The author has told his story, named the people he likes and why he likes them (and in a few cases, why he dislikes somebody) and named a couple of records they made. Hes almost never boring, and when writing about the music and singers of California he seems to find a subject which absolutely suits his style, so that images of Lou Adler, Johnny Rivers, the Beach Boys and Sonny and Cher suddenly find focus. But there are times when that style jars, with its magpie thieving of bright words from too many cultures, so that were told Tina Turners arse is cosmic, and people makes strikes, wipe out, and boss things. But thats pop. The blues, Paul Oliver could tell you, isnt pop. Or it wasnt. His book The Story Of The Blues came out a month ago, 175 huge picture-packed pages for 60s., published by Barrie and Rockcliff. It makes about as much reference to pop as Nik Cohns book does to the blues, a single disparaging paragraph. If Nik Cohn sees no relevance in the fact that three quarters of the people he likes are singing a version of the blues, Paul Oliver seems to find it sad that black people dont still sing the same way they did before the war. HOSTILITY Paul Olivers refusal to consider the value of contemporary music is particularly strange in view of his own criticism at the beginning of this book of the people who were interested in Negro music when the blues was first being developed. Instead of attending to the blues, those researchers busied themselves with collecting folk-songs that predated the blues. Occasional verses and fragments were noted but generally the collectors looked upon the blues with hostility, regarding it as a degeneration of the folk-lore they were anxious to save. Yet this describes Paul Olivers own reaction as he contemplates soul in the last part of the book. So he leaves out – perhaps never listened to – Sam Cookes A Change Is Gonna Come, Bobby Patterson and The Mustangs Good Ol Days and Tyrone Davis Can I Change My Mind, three songs which express as much as any blues song, keeping close to the blues tradition of expressing a personal feeling in a style which drew from the singers culture, using words and rhythms that met the taste of the audience at the time. Of course, this failure to consider the present does not seriously affect the value of The Story Of The Blues as a collection of pictures and information which has no rival. The narrative which runs through the book is perhaps less exciting than LeRoi Jones Blues People or Charles Keils Urban Blues, but it is far more reliable, and will provide exactly the right kind of background a reader needs in order to be able to tackle the complicated theories of Jones and Keil. Paul Olivers previous books, Blues Fell This Morning, Conversations With The Blues and Screening The Blues have proposed the importance of the blues as a kind of documentary recording of black peoples reactions to their culture; the reader has been frustrated by not knowing how important – to their contemporary audiences – some of the songs and singers were. The Story Of The Blues at last provides a coherent order, tracing the simultaneous developments of various styles in various places, managing to keep an interesting commentary running through the straight information like date and place of birth, influence, style, success and subsequent fate. The pictures of Northern cities and Southern prisons, road-side juke joints and billboard posters reinforce the message of the commentary, and the photographs of singers arouse curiosity and lead the reader into the text – what did he do? NO DISCUSSION One blues singer seems to have been almost ignored – Jimmie Rodgers. Paul Oliver mentions that he toured with some other, black, blues singers with a medicine show in Texas, and that blues singers from the Mississippi Sheiks to Snooks Eaglin have used his material and even imitated his style. But there is no discussion of the inter-relationship between black and white cultures that these references suggest. But thats a small complaint about a marvellous book. The contrast between the technique of Paul Oliver and Nik Cohn is fascinating, but its a pity each could not have taken just a little from the style of the other, Paul Oliver to conjure the excitement which people like Bo Diddley and Screamin Jay Hawkins create, and Nik Cohn to slow down just long enough to assemble a little information we couldnt get from The Daily Mail Book Of Golden Records. Two things I learned, one that Rock Around The Clock was first recorded by Ivory Joe Hunter (did anybody else know that?), the other that on a pub lavatory wall in Gateshead there is the inscription, Buddy Holly lives and rocks in Tijuana, Mexico. © Charlie Gillett, 1969
Posted on: Mon, 11 Nov 2013 19:46:56 +0000
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