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TRACK 7: “Torn and Frayed” and “Explain it to Me.” Mick pays tribute to the guitar player who’s becoming a pharmaceutical wreck, but can “steal your heart away” with his guitar playing. Phair puzzles over “medicine” and the “fame injection” that allow someone “jump higher” and “run farther” than they should.

TRACK 8: “Sweet Black Angel” and “Canary.” Mick’s anthem for Angela Davis, the philosopher and political activist imprisoned in 1970. Phair knows why the caged girlfriend sings.

TRACK 13: “I just Wanna See His Face” and “Shatter.” Mick sings about Jesus (sometimes you don’t “want to walk and talk about Jesus / You just want to see his face”), while Phair finds her world shattered by a guy who makes her see herself in a profoundly different light (“something about being with you/slapped me right in the face”).

10

When the Whip Comes Down

RANDALL E. AUXIER

One thing drives another in a band. It all has to melt together.

Basically it’s all liquid.

—Keith Richards, Life

Rock’n’roll music isn’t supposed to be healthy or wholesome, but it’s got its own satisfaction(s). It’s all about energy and what to do with it. To organize energies you have to constrain them for a moment, to store up some excess, to hold that excess (against its natural tendency to flow out and diffuse itself into moments of pure enduring), and then release it again in little bursts of suffering life. To rock’n’roll is to release that pent-up power in tiny explosions, between sixty and a hundred sixty times per minute, in groups of four.

You can tell it’s rock’n’roll when every explosion destroys as much as it creates. It has to do that to rock. You might swing or two-step without hurting anything, but you’ll never rock until you are willing to whip the moment into submission even as you make time. Keith Richards calls it the “discipline” of a rhythm section. You have to chain something up, and whip it until it feels bad enough to be good. That is the rhythm of rock’n’roll. It stings the hindside of the gods, because even they don’t get to live forever without at least dying a little death at the end of every bar.

Mad Men

Whenever the music gets too acceptable, too commercial, too packaged, whenever it starts to look too sanitary, you can bet that some kind of upheaval is in the offing. Rock re-invents itself by pulling down whatever it has built. It’s easy to see the pattern now, that for every Hall and Oates chart-topper, there is a sneering Johnny Rotten take-down, or if you can’t quite handle any more Culture Club, there is Kurt Cobain to take a bullet for you and for many.

And so it goes. That balance between pop swill and rock music has always been uncomfortable, but it’s clearer now what rock does to cleanse itself of the disgusting sweet excrescence that just is the music business. It makes your fingers sticky, no matter who you are. But back in the day, you know, 1965 or so, it was difficult to know what to do about Herman’s Hermits, and the ridiculous Freddie and the Dreamers, and the list goes on.

But rock’n’roll is able to survive its occasional confinement in that thin air, high above Madison Avenue and Fleet Street. It’s like electricity trapped in the clouds; somehow rock music finds its way to ground. The Mad Men devise their insulators, little three-minute morsels of mind-numbing neutrons, weighing down the real protons, with only a few sugary electrons in orbit, and they sell it to the kids. But the kids are already jumping with their own charges and pretty soon, well, let’s just say they’ll get their ya-yas out. When they do what all of nature commands and commends, Herman’s Hermits won’t turn the tricks anymore. They need some real rhythm, and that means something has to be under the whip. Enter their Satanic Majesties. I promise to reveal, in the end, what gets sacrificed on that altar.

“It”

For now let’s concentrate on the energy, that electricity that always finds its way to ground. It’s difficult to offer a schematic of the circuit path. Whatever it is that makes a man or a