American music continues to fascinate us. The birthplace of many popular music styles (from country, blues, soul and jazz to the all-embracing, interlocking Rubik's cube of rock 'n' roll and hip-hop), the country's musical breadth has been inspired by its size - the very nature of which has allowed, if not conspired to allow, sub genres and further below-the-radar types of music to thrive.
There are pockets of music within the country that are rigidly regionalised, but that doesn't stop them from making a mark sometime, somewhere throughout the rest of the world.
Many music writers and journalists have attempted to illuminate the darker aspects of the American Dream and two of the best attempts have been from the US: Greil Marcus's Mystery Train (juxtaposing Robert Johnson, Herman Melville, Tocqueville and Elvis Presley; compelling only if you can bother to get past the furrow-browed academic text) and Peter Guralnick's Feel Like Going Home (portraits of Muddy Waters, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich; essential music writing with the added subtle nuances of a novelist).
Now along comes Barney Hoskyns, an established and highly regarded UK music writer, who graduated through the pages of New Musical Express, Mojo, the monthly glossies and the daily inkies. He was US editor at Mojo from 1996 to 1999 and is currently Editorial Director of Rock's Backpages, the online library of rock 'n' roll (www.rocksbackpages.com).
While Ragged Glories is aptly titled, it is misleadingly marketed. Subtitled "City Lights, Country Funk, American Music", one would expect to find within its pages a cross-cutting, intersecting musical guide to America, with theoretical guitar strings stretched across from New York to Los Angeles, Seattle to New Orleans. In fact, it's something altogether less captivating: a collection of previously published interviews with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Randy Newman, Prince, Beck, James Brown, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Tom Waits and Alex Chilton.
Anyone expecting a pretentious display of multi-stranded, self-indulgent, Matrix-like music criticism would be well advised to check out Paul Morley's new book, Words and Music. Thankfully, Hoskyns' writing is far earthier and although the initial disappointment of discovering that Ragged Glories is a compendium of articles rankles, there's little doubt that it's one of the better volumes to have crossed our path in recent times. He is helped, of course, by the subjects - people who either have something valid and insightful to say or who are so caught up in their own dysfunction it's impossible to sort out the person from the myth. Either way, they make for entertaining, informative reading, be it Joni Mitchell saying that once a star feels trapped in their hotel room their life is over; Lou Reed stating that negative music criticism is like "a pit bull gnawing at your groin"; Johnny Cash looking into the mirror and seeing not an American icon but a man with pimples, a fat jaw and thinning hair ("An icon? Shit, no. Not in my mirror); or Alex Chilton refursing to be interviewed on the grounds that (according to record producer Jon Tiven) "he's probably afraid you will see a glimpse of his dark soul and it'll come out in the article, and maybe he wont get laid as much."
Much more focused and more in line with mythopoetic America is Hoskyns'
reissued Across The Great Divide, his justifiably acclaimed biography of The
Band and a book destined to be elected into the pantheon of Great Rock Books any time now. If any single rock act represented the sense of America as a country of possibilities (rather than, as Greil Marcus intimates in Mystery Train, an oppressive, virtually invulnerable monolithic entity), then The Band was that unit. Four Canadians and a drummer from Arkansas transformed traditional Americana (vaudeville, country, gospel, carnival jazz) into a wholly current music that reflected the Arcadian aspirations of a rootless generation. Hoskyns' research into The Band goes beyond mere attention to detail; strands of the initial chemistry and eventual internecine break-up are twisted into a tensile rope of insight that could - unlike Ragged Glories, which is essentially a dip-in/dip-out tome - be read in one lengthy session. After which you could take out the CDs.
- Tony Clayton-Lea is a freelance journalist/broadcaster and rock music critic
Ragged Glories by Barney Hoskyns
Pimlico, 370pp. £12.50
Across the Great Divide by Barney Hoskyns
Pimlico, 449pp. £12.50