The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, January 9, 1991-- Page 7
Crosstown
Traffic: the
definitive
study
by Annette Petruso
first of two parts
spent 5 years in someone else's
life," said Charles Shaar Murray
during a phone interview from his
home in London. Murray is author
of Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix
and the post-war rock 'n' roll rev-
olution (or in the U.K., Jimi Hen-
drix and post-war pop), one of the
most concise, engrossing and well-
constructed books on popular music
9 wrjtten in recent memory.
4,
Amid lame "biographies" of
"artists" like The New Kids on the
Block (which, by the way, The New
9York Times Review of Books has
listed in the top 10 best selling pa-
perback non-fiction books for the
past six weeks), one or two readable
histories of bands such as the Doors
and the Who and a few outstanding
: books on Black popular music,
Crosstown Traffic raises the stan-
dards to which future books on any
kind of popular music must aspire.
Though this book will probably
never be on any best seller list, it is
most certainly one of the best writ-
ten and most informative books
about one of the important influ-
ences on music today. Where would
'most heavy metal bands be if Hen-
drix not had a hand in bringing to
(white) public attention such guitar
effects as the wah-wah pedal and a
stage show in which he slung his
electric guitar around his crotch?
'Probably standing and scratching
themselves.
Murray didn't do Crosstown for
the money; the mention of said New
Kids biography elicited this
iesponse: "I'm consumed with
jealousy. Why the fuck did I write a
book about Jimi Hendrix? I should
have written a book about New Kids
on the Block and made two hundred
times as much money. What am I
talking about? Two thousand times
as much money."
Fuck the money. As a music
journalist/critic, Murray collected
and wrote Crosstown Traffic on a
shoe-string budget over a 5-year pe-
riod.This limited his options as to
the style of the book, but it didn't
matter when he figured out what he
wanted to do. He explained, "I'm
* fascinated by the way artistic tradi-
tions intersect and are affected by
their times. And I wanted to get dis-
4 cussion of Hendrix away from all
this sex and drugs and wild man of
rock stuff and focus on the work and
see where that took me. The book is
not objective in any sense....
Instead, what Murray has done is
* RECORDS
Continued from page 5
Way as I make my place on the dance
floor. Unfortunately, Groovy, Laid-
back and Nasty rarely makes you feel
like dancing at all.
The problem is that Groovy is
pretty boring. It's as if Cabaret
Voltaire spent the last two years lis-
'tening to house music and said to
themselves, "Hey, we can do that!"
And that is the main fault with
Groovy. Almost every song sounds
familiar, like it has been played in
clubs and on alternative radio for the
last few years.
The string and piano stabs, the
beeps, soulful singers in the back-
ground and those damned house
drums are all prevalent throughout
the album. All these elements are
computerized and "perfect," but these
Charles Shaar Murray and the state of the "rock book"
explore Hendrix in a musical cultural
context. He discusses in depth artists
like Robert Johnson and Charlie
Christian and music like jazz, soul
and the blues to analyze where Hen-
drix came from. By doing this, he
has given the reader a concise guide
to some of the major movements of
music in the 20th century. For once,
an author talks intelligently about
what the music says.
Previously the best known work
on Hendrix was David Henderson's
biography 'Scuse Me While I Kiss
the Sky. Unfortunately, it reads like
a gossipy, new age kind of thing be-
cause Henderson writes constantly
about Hendrix's love life and seems
to think he successfully invaded
Hendrix's consciousness.
For example, how do you think
Henderson knows what Hendrix felt
right before he died? "Jimi turns in
bed and tries to get up," Henderson
writes. "He feels sick to his
stomach.... He feels bile coming
into his mouth. It takes a
superhuman effort for him to sway
his body toward the edge of the bed.
A stream of bile comes from his
mouth. His cheek rests against the
sheet. The sheet absorbs the bile.
His retching ceases. Suddenly he
does not care any more. He falls
quickly back into semi-conscious-
ness."
Comparatively, Murray has a
nimble writing style which matches
the book's angle. He also has a
sense of humor which is lacking in
many quarters of the earth, most no-
tably in music journalism. At one
point in Crosstown Traffic, he
quips, "Frank Marino, the Canadian
one-time boy wonder who formed
Mahogany Rush after allegedly com-
ing down from an acid trip in hospi-
tal and discovering he was the rein-
carnation of Jimi Hendrix (I type
this with a straight face and trust
you will read it likewise) ...." While
Henderson devoted about 400 pages
to telling the life story of Hendrix,
Murray lays out "the facts" in one
chapter, and Murray's reads much
more realistically.
The organization, the flow of the
chapters and what they say make
Crosstown Traffic unique among
popular music books. He weaves
cultural and musical critique with his
opinion of Hendrix's music. Murray
said he came up with this style
mostly out of necessity. "Quite early
in the proceedings, I realized that I
didn't want to write a conventional
biography and even if I had wanted
to, I simply didn't have the budget
to do it properly," he said.
"So rather than re-plow the...
. story of Hendrix's life and try to
painstakingly pry previously
unprinted anecdotes out of people
lines, a profound world-weariness
and despair."
-But as far as many reviewers are
concerned, the chapter which elo-
quently summarizes the short careers
of famed Delta bluesman Robert
Johnson and ground-breaking jazz
guitarist Charlie Christian is the
most important in the book. It
stands out from the rest of the book,
like a great guitar solo (maybe one
of Hendrix's) that bends the song so
much that superficially it seems like
the solo has almost nothing to do
with the song. Murray said he
wanted to relate them to the simi-
larly brief life of Hendrix.
"Why Robert Johnson and Char-
lie Christian are there, especially in
a book which had post-war, in its
British sub-title anyway, these are
both pre-war figures," he said. "They
were both young Black innovators
who died premature deaths. One was
a bluesman who I would submit al-
most re-defined the blues and the
other was a guitar player who re-de-
fined the guitar. They both crammed
an awful lot of immortal work into a
very short space of time. Both of
them were in a sense undone by their
own flaws. So to me the spirits of
Robert Johnson and Charlie Chris-
tian and their personal histories and
the actual work that they did strike
very resonant chords when thinking
about Hendrix. Each one is almost a
precursor of a certain aspect of Hen-
drix's work and they were, for me,
eerie resonances in facts of their
lives."
Murray elaborates on the theme
of the blues, exploring Hendrix as
bluesman. Murray discusses the mu-
sic itself. One way is to speculate
where he thinks Hendrix got certain
guitar techniques. His descriptions
are just technical enough so that the
lay reader can at least get the gist of
what he is talking about. Murray
also explores the cultural manifesta-
tions of the blues, especially in
Hendrix's early musical days. Hen-
drix "absorbed the culture of the spe-
cific strata of Black American life in
which the blues held its strongest
sway. He lived as an itinerant with a
guitar, like the country bluesman of
the '30s, and, like them, he played
whatever music someone was pre-
pared to hear," he said.
Murray further explains the tran-
sition in relevance from blues to
soul succinctly and explores many
soul artists in relation to .Hendrix.
Bouncing off a quote of Eric Clap-
ton's, Murray writes: "Black people
had had quite enough of feeling
'quite alone' and without options and
alternatives, quite enough of the no-
tion of one man or woman (with or
without a guitar) against the world.
... And by replacing the romantic
individualism of the blues with the
community spirit of gospel, his
(Ray Charles) music spoke volumes
about the leverage black America
could exert through collective action.
Soul music was about an end to
'divide and rule'; it was - and is -
about black America getting itself
together."
Crosstown implies most of the
men who played soul and R&B and
hired Hendrix as a sideman never
could stand Hendrix's manner. "Most
of them were originally from the ru-
ral South; even the superflash, su-
perbad Wicked Wilson Pickett was
raised up in a shack miles from the
nearest town, which was the teeming
metropolis of Prattsville, Alabama,"
Murray writes. "They were proud
men, and they hadn't fought their
way every inch from Dogpatch,
Mississippi in the face of every ob-
stacle that the Land of the Free could
throw at them just so's some
drugged-out space-case from Seattle
could show up at a gig looking like
a street bum and then put on his
own show at stage left while they
were trying to go to work. That
wasn't just an irritation, that was an
insult."
Crosstown Traffic is thoughtful
and arguably Murray's best work
thus far. Both Murray and Henderson
come across obsessed and excited
fans but Murray is able to focus this
energy into resplendent writing.
Murray said he did it because "I
felt that most of the existing writing
on Hendrix had concentrated on him
as part of the '60s freak show, you
know, file under '60s people who
died of drugs and '60s people who
burnt and smashed guitars and wore
funny clothes. I just got the feeling
he was being treated as part of the
freak show rather than a great Amer-
ican artist. And so when nobody
emerged with a book like that, I real-
ized with mounting horror that I was
going to have to climb off my butt,
and write the book myself."
who knew him, I wanted to try to
look for him in his music because I
think he was more present in his
music than in anything else he did
and I also found the music
fascinating," he continued. "I wanted
to look at the music and the times in
which it was created. I mean, there
were at the time of publication...
five existing Hendrix biographies
and I knew that there were going to
be more. And I thought, without
massive resources, who needs
another one?"
Murray said he used previous bi-
ographies, and many other secondary.
sources, in an attempt to change
how and what people think about
Hendrix.
"The existing biographies of
Hendrix and a great deal of other
stuff I found invaluable," he said.
"One reason why I didn't feel too bad
about not having the facilities to at-
tempt to simply one up the existing
biographies is that I felt a lot of the
information about Hendrix was al-
ready out there and already in the
public domain had not been properly
analyzed .... I felt that even working
from secondary sources, I could still
combine and collect the information
to come up with some different in-
terpretations from the prevailing,
ones and to a certain extent I think
I've succeeded because a lot of the
writing about Hendrix that I've seen
in the last year, whether people agree
with me or not, have had to ac-
knowledge my agenda. To a certain
extent, I think I've changed the de-
bate...."
The chapters reflect these changes
and this new style, each with an ob-
vious precise goal. For example, in
the chapter titled "I'm a Man (At
Least I'm Trying to Be): So was
Jimi Hendrix a sexist pig or what?,"
Murray discusses the sexual and the
sex god image Hendrix has acquired.
It also features one of the best sen-
tences in the book: "Post-coital
tristesse, is simply another manifes-
tation of the existential melancholy
which subsumes all but the most
overtly celebratory of Hendrix's
songs, and 'Manic Depression'
sketches out, in comparatively few
are things that went out with the
'80s. The best dance musicians in
Detroit and Chicago have pretty
much moved on to other things.
One of the only bright spots on
the album is the song "Runaway."
The drums and bass move this song
and the rap by Steel in the middle is
good. The only problem is that even
this variety seems old. I can almost
hear them in the studio now, "Hey,
rap is really happening. Let's have
this song break into a rap. Who can
we get?" Even though it's a bit pre-
tentious this is still one of the few
songs that seems really new.
DIEHARD Cabaret Voltaire fans
will buy Groovy, Laidback and
Nasty anyway, so the heck with
them. But for everyone else, if
"Runaway" is released as domestic
12", grab it. Otherwise you'll prob-
See RECORDS, Page 8
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