Search Results for: Rolling Stone

An Oral History of Detroit Punk Rock

Negative Approach playing the Freezer, Detroit, early 1982. Photo by Davo Scheich

Steve Miller | Detroit Rock City | DaCapo Press | June 2013 | 39 minutes (7,835 words)

 

Detroit is known for many things: Motown, automobiles, decline and rebirth. This is the story of Detroit’s punk and hardcore music scenes, which thrived in the suffering city center between the late-1970s and mid-80s. Told by the players themselves, it’s adapted from Steve Miller’s lively, larger oral history Detroit Rock City, which covers everyone from Iggy and the Stooges to the Gories to the White StripesOur thanks to Miller and DaCapo for sharing this with the Longreads community.

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Don Was (Was (Not Was) bassist, vocalist; Traitors, vocalist, producer; Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Iggy Pop): So in the seventies I used to read the Village Voice, and I started seeing the ads for CBGB and these bands with the crazy names…and I told Jack [Tann, friend and local music producer] about it: “There must be some way to create something like that here. There must be bands like this here.” I formed a band called the Traitors, and Jack became a punk rock promoter, which wasn’t the way to approach music like that. It was supposed to look cooler than to go in like P. T. Barnum.

Mark Norton (Ramrods, 27 vocalist, journalist, Creem magazine): We were trying to figure out what was next. I called CBGB in ’75 or early ’76; there was a girl who tended bar there named Susan Palermo, she worked there for ages. And she would tell Hilly Kristal: “Hey, there’s this crazy guy from Detroit—he’s calling again.” I’d say, “Could you just put the phone down so I could listen to the groups?” I heard part of a set by the Talking Heads like that. It sounded like it was through a phone, but I was getting all excited, you know—this sounds like what I like. My phone bill was incredible, $200 bucks. In the summer of 1976 I went to New York City. I saw the second Dead Boys show at CBGB. I saw the Dictators. Handsome Dick and his girlfriend at the time, Jodi at the time, said, “Who are you?” I said, “I’m from Detroit.” They said, “Have you ever seen the Stooges?” “Yeah man, I saw them millions of times, the best shows, the ones in Detroit.” I was thinking, “none of these people have seen shit.’

Chris Panackia , aka Cool Chris (sound man at every locale in Detroit): The only people that could stand punk rock music were the gays, and Bookie’s was a drag bar, so they accepted them as “look at them. They’re different.” “They’re expressing themselves.” Bookie’s became the place that you could play. Bookie’s had its clique, and there were a lot of bands that weren’t in that clique. Such as Cinecyde. The Mutants really weren’t. Bookie’s bands were the 27, which is what the Ramrods became. Coldcock, the Sillies, the Algebra Mothers, RUR. Vince Bannon and Scott Campbell had…Bookie’s because it was handed to them basically. You know, “Okay, let’s do this punk rock music. We got a place.” To get a straight bar to allow these bands that drew flies to play at a Friday and Saturday night was nearly impossible. What bar owner is going to say, “Oh yeah, you guys can play your originals, wreck the place, and have no people”? Perfect for a bar owner. Loves that, right? There really wasn’t another venue.

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The Fault in Our Stars: On Fake Celebrity Interviews

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | November 2018 | 11 minutes (2,670 words)

“I play with my breasts, not to show off but to demonstrate a kind of revulsion. I simply transform myself into a voice for all the tormented souls of this world.”

That’s Courtney Love in 1996 in SZ, the magazine belonging to one of the largest newspapers in Germany, Süddeutsche Zeitung. It sounds a little crazy, but then, she’s a little crazy. And anyway, Tom Kummer, the Swiss journalist who attempted to style himself after Hunter S. Thompson, always filed outlandish exclusives and cover stories like this from Los Angeles — Pamela Anderson on her aching implants, Mike Tyson on eating cockroaches, Bruce Willis on immorality. From the mid-nineties to 2000, he was kind of a celebrity himself. Beloved by editors, he also wrote for the German magazines Der Spiegel and Stern and Switzerland’s Die Weltwoche. In fact, it was in the latter that, roughly two years before the Love interview, he wrote, funnily enough: “She plays with her breasts not to show off but to demonstrate revulsion. She wants to embody the voice of all tormented souls in the world.”

Tom Kummer had been flagged for fabrication before, but it wasn’t until an exposé in Focus magazine in 2000 that it was confirmed: he had never interviewed Love, or Brad Pitt or Sharon Stone or Kim Basinger, or anyone really. SZ followed with a breakdown of his deceit, like The New York Times would with Jayson Blair in 2003; it published an apology for the “falsified” stories and fired editors Christian Kämmerling and Ulf Poschardt. You would think Kummer would at least nod at contrition — like Janet Cooke in 1982, like Stephen Glass in 1998 — but he took the Jonah Lehrer route instead and talked boundaries. He even had a name for his approach: borderline journalism. “I wrote impressionistic, creative, literary descriptions of the life of stars in the form of so-called interviews,” he told The Guardian in 2011, adding, “Everybody loved my stuff and I guess they were addicted to some kind of illusion that stars should talk like I made them talk.” He claimed he was never asked for proof, that his editors had approved of his methods. As Stern’s publisher told the Times, they — Kummer and his editors — “appeared to have a different idea of journalism.” Read more…

Let’s Talk About Sex Scenes

Anna Sastre / Unsplash / Pexels / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

The first sex scene ever filmed was not a sex scene at all. It was a kiss. And there was way less kissing than talking. May Irwins’ make out session with John Rice, a recreation of the smooch from the Broadway musical The Widow Jones, took all of one second. Filmed in 1896 at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio, the soundless footage — titled, simply, The Kiss — opens with Irwin deep in conversation with Rice. While it is impossible to tell what they are saying, the two actors appear to be discussing logistics. Thirteen seconds in they seem in agreement. Both pull back, Rice dramatically smooths out his moustache and, while Irwin is still talking, he cups her face and the two of them peck. Or, on his end, nibble. All in all, the actual moment their lips touch is almost nothing — 94 percent of the first sex scene was actually the discourse around it.

Were this to happen today, the actors would have had clearer direction. Last week Rolling Stone reported that HBO would be hiring intimacy coordinators for every show that called for it after “The Deuce” star Emily Meade, who plays a prostitute in the series, asked for help with her sex scenes. The network consulted Intimacy Directors International (IDI), a non-profit established in 2016 that represents theatre, tv and film directors and choreographers specializing in the carnal. “The Intimacy Director takes responsibility for the emotional safety of the actors and anyone else in the rehearsal hall while they are present,” their site explains, alongside a standard set of guidelines called The Pillars: context (understanding the story), communication, consent, choreography and closure (signaling the end of the scene). Read more…

Nic and David Sheff on ‘Beautiful Boy’ and Telling Addiction Stories Responsibly

Nic and David Sheff at a book signing in 2008. Shawn Ehlers / Stringer

Zachary Siegel | Longreads | November 2018 | 14 minutes (3,640 words)

Some books have a way of finding you at just the moment you need them. That’s been the case with me and the father-son memoirs that serve as the source texts for Beautiful Boy, a new film about a family wrestling with addiction, starring a worried-sick Steve Carell as David Sheff, father to his dopesick son, Nic, played by Timothée Chalamet.

Nic Sheff’s drug memoir, Tweak, was resting on my friend’s coffee table with little crumbs of weed on the black and red cover. It was 2010 and I was a 21-year-old daily smoker of black tar heroin. I rarely left my apartment in Denver, which had become a dark opium bunker, burnt tin-foil and hollowed out Bic pens (“tooters”) strewn about. One day I left to buy some weed from a friend, and there was Nic’s book. I asked to borrow it; nonchalantly, I should add, making it seem as though addiction was only a cursory interest of mine, as opposed to a ghost that had been following me for years.

I devoured all 352 pages in a couple days. Melting wherever I sat, hours-long reading sessions on heroin were quite comfy. But after a few hours I’d have to shut one eye to keep from seeing doubles. I’m realizing only now that I never returned Nic’s book to my friend — I swear I’m not that guy anymore. Read more…

Shelved: The Sound of Big Star’s Self-Destruction

Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Getty

Tom Maxwell | Longreads | October 2018 | 16 minutes (3,146 words)

 

In 1948, Columbia Records introduced the first commercial long-playing record, which revolved at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute and could hold more than 20 minutes of music per side. The older technology, 78-rpm records, couldn’t hold more than three and a half minutes per side. It was now possible to make a self-contained album.

Prior to that, the term “album” was used to describe a printed collection of short classical music pieces, such as Felix Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. Later, 78 records would be bound in volumes called albums, which would allow the limited medium to communicate longer orchestral works. By the same token, the books that contained family photos also became known as albums.

With the new technology, it wasn’t long before albums were used to communicate a collection of songs united by a common theme. Frank Sinatra is widely credited with releasing the first concept album, 1955’s In the Wee Small Hours. All of the songs were arranged by Nelson Riddle and were united in their themes of love, loss, and romantic dissolution.

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“This Halloween is Something to Be Sure”: An Examination of Lou Reed’s New York

(Photo by Waring Abbott/Getty Images)

New York is an outlier in Lou Reed’s discography. The 1989 album—his fifteenth—is arguably his most straight-forward, track after track of stunningly simple music, just featuring a few guitars and Reed’s deadpan and utterly dry cutting lyrics.  Read more…

Falling in Love with Chicago at Night: An Interview with Jessica Hopper

University of Texas Press / Author photo by David Sampson

Ashley Naftule | Longreads | September 2018 | 9 minutes (2,464 words)

It takes a writer of considerable talent to gear-shift from meditations on mortality to goofy stoner daydreams (and not give the reader whiplash while she’s doing it). It’s a tonal trick Jessica Hopper pulls off over and over again in Night Moves, a poignant (and often hilarious) memoir of her time in Chicago in the early aughts. On one page, Hopper is solemnly reflecting, “You make peace with death’s swift manners and it raises you up”; on another, she’s wondering what it’d be like to run over a great poet with a dune buggy. Ruminations on aging, community, love, and friendships stand shoulder-to-shoulder with sharp, madcap anecdotes, like when a stranger at a nightclub says Hopper resembles “a kabuki donkey” on the dancefloor, or when a pair of socialites at a music festival are aghast at how she’s eating an apple directly off the core. The poetry and absurdity of existence are constant companions in the pages of Night Moves.

The veteran author’s easy grace with the written word comes as no surprise when you take her long career into account. Starting off as a D.I.Y. zine writer, Hopper quickly rose through the ranks to become a freelancer and contributor to publications like SPIN, Grand Royal, Rolling Stone, GQ, Punk Planet, and The Chicago Reader. She’s been an editor at Pitchfork, Rookie, MTV News, and the University of Texas Press. Her knack for juggling incisive cultural criticism with personal reflections and wry humor can be seen in her 2015 collection of music writing, The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic.

While music comes up often in Night Moves (“Loving the Smiths is one thing, but loving Morrissey is another thing entirely,” Hopper writes), it’s a book that’s more concerned with what happens just outside of and right next to the rituals of listening to records and going to shows. It’s a book about long bike rides to venues, the sadness of watching friends get blitzed on cocaine at dance nights, the joys of holing up in an apartment and reading back issues of The New Yorker while the city freezes outside. Hopper’s book is a testament to the pleasures of bumming around, the ecstasy of slowing down and enjoying the neighborhood and your friends before career and family and all the other milestones of adulthood start accelerating your timeline. Read more…

‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’

"Punkers and policemen face each other during a demonstration against the census on the 9th of May in 1987." Chris Hoffmann/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images, Algonquin Books

Will Hermes | Longreads | September 2018 | 14 minutes (3,534 words)

Punk rock was revolution-minded from the get-go, at least about aesthetics. Its political consciousness bloomed later –- most vividly in the U.K., then in scenes around the world. Yet for all the anti-Thatcher, anti-Reagan bluster, punk can lay direct claim to just one full regime change. That’s the takeaway from Tim Mohr’s revelatory new book Burning Down The Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. It chronicles the rise of the scene — essentially seeded, Mohr writes, by a 15-year-old girl whose moniker became Major — in the Soviet Bloc German Democratic Republic in the ’80s. As its numbers swelled, it attracted the attention of the famously ruthless Stasi intelligence and security force (basically the KGB of the GDR), whose mandate included crushing any murmurs of rebelliousness or dissent, and who employed a psychological warfare strategy known as Zersetzung, or decomposition, towards those ends. Kids were picked up and interrogated, for hours and even days, for their haircuts, or clothing, or scraps of paper with song lyrics. For even minor transgressions, they lost college placements, government-controlled apartments, and jobs, their parents and relatives often punished in a similar manner. Kids were arrested and beaten, spent months in prison, threatened with expatriation.

Yet the scene kept growing. Bands like Namenlos and Schleim-Keim formed, playing gigs in church compounds — pretty much the only places alternative culture could exist, since church “open work” spaces were theoretically off-limits to the Stasi, at least initially. There, communities grew; punks connected with environmental activists and others working for change, sharing strategies and collaborating. They staged concerts and festivals, which the Stasi tried to suppress. When street protests began in force, swelling from thousands to hundreds of thousands, and the Berlin Wall finally came down in 1989, it was a culmination of the civil unrest that began in significant part, Mohr suggests, with a handful of strong-willed teenage punks hanging out at a park in Plänterwald.

Mohr encountered this history during his years in East Berlin, where he deejayed in clubs that had sprouted in the free-for-all communities of post-reunification Germany — clubs often created, staffed and attended by the same culture warriors that came up in the ’80s punk scene. Mohr spoke with us from his current home in Brooklyn, NY.

Listen to an audio version of this interview on the Longreads Podcast:

Longreads: So how did you first wind up in Berlin? This was after the wall fell, right?

Tim Mohr: Yeah, it was ‘92, so two years after unification. I was just determined to live abroad for a while, and I didn’t really have much of a clue about Germany. I guess I’d say I was a stupid American at the time. I thought Oktoberfest and Germany were the same thing, and I expected to get off the plane in Berlin and see everyone running around in lederhosen.

Chugging beer…

Yeah, out of giant mugs. And of course, it wasn’t the case. I ended up in a typical Eastern Bloc high rise, far in the East. This was somewhat disappointing. But pretty quickly I discovered the scene that was happening in crumbling old buildings in the central part of town, where people were squatting and the first generation of clubs and bars were up and running.

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We’re Not Ready for Mars

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Justin Nobel | Longreads | September 2018 | 12 minutes (3,068 words)

Earlier this year, as the climate crisis continued to spin out of control and our president divvied up our public lands and coastal waters to the oil and gas industry, many of us good happy Americans in the Resistance sat in our cubicles and living rooms to watch SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy hurtle toward our nearest red orb neighbor, gleefully convinced that this was the beginning of the thing that was going to save us. “One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event,” wrote the man behind the rocket, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, in 2017. “The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”

I find myself disagreeing and wondering what mind-numbing drug everyone is smoking. Then I find myself realizing, oh wait, this is just American culture, and we’ve had this idea that this land is the best, that we are the greatest, that there is nowhere or nothing better rammed down our throats since birth. Sure, we’re great, I don’t discount our freedoms, but were not all the peoples and cultures trampled and annihilated to forge this county also great? And here is the point: We are going into space with the same domineering mind-set that colonists have had when they’ve entered every new continent and realm.

Even the language and rhetoric of the latest space wave, which Musk is happily at the helm of, is the same. Colonizing. Taking over a “dead” world. Bringing our wonderful gifts of technology and culture to some godforsaken place. The saving of a race, the saving of an entire world, the nationalistic pride, the promise of an unfettered new land, the promise of bounty, the extraction of new resources. I am sorry, this leads nowhere good, and the reason is that there is no spirituality involved. If we enter space without a spiritual reckoning for what we’ve done to the Earth, we will kill space just as we are killing Earth. In fact, our contamination of space is well on its way. Read more…

Michael, Aretha, Beyoncé, and the Black Press

Johnson Publishing Company / Ebony Media Operations, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Michael Jackson had special relationships with Ebony and Jet. Since their beginnings, the publications, founded by John H. Johnson in Chicago in 1945 and 1951, covered the lives of Black celebrities, professionals, and everyday people alongside a strong political undercurrent.

Jet was a weekly digest memorable to me for the Beauty of the Week centerfolds my uncles and cousins scattered around their homes and the Black music charts printed at the back of each issue. It’s perhaps best known for photographs of the mutilated body of Emmett Till, published in 1955.

The lifestyle monthly Ebony was patterned after Life and Look. In its January 1960 issue, a remarkable story written by William B. Davis profiled several Black Americans living in Russia in the midst of the Cold War, asking, “Who are the Negroes in Russia? How did they get there? How are they treated? Are they really free?” A story on Miles Davis from December 1982 was mostly about his recovery from a stroke, but he also critiqued Rolling Stone. I like that magazine,” he said to Ebony, “but the last time I saw it, it had all white guys in it. How about Kool and the Gang? Earth, Wind, and Fire? They should write more about people like that.”

Throughout Michael’s 40 years in show business, Ebony published stories such as “The Michael Jackson Nobody Knows,” on important career milestones. In an interview from 1987, about the release of Bad, he utters a simple but heavy sentence: “I don’t remember not performing.” These stories humanize Michael and try to turn the narrative away from the spectacle and speculation growing around him. The coverage would become strategic when he faced allegations of sexual misconduct with minors. John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote about discovering this phenomenon in his essay “Michael”:

It’s fascinating to read the interviews he gave to Ebony and Jet over the past thirty years. I confess myself disoriented by them, as a white person. During whole stretches of years when the big media were reporting endlessly on his bizarreness and reclusiveness, he was every so often granting these intimate and illuminating sit-downs to those magazines, never forgetting to remind them that he trusted only them, would speak only to them. The articles make me realize that about the only Michael Jackson I’ve ever known, personality-wise, is a Michael Jackson who’s defending himself against white people who are passive-aggressively accusing him of child molestation. He spoke differently to black people, was more at ease. The language and grain of detail are different.

What a pleasure to find him listening to early ‘writing version demos of his own compositions and saying, ‘Listen to that, that’s at home, Janet, Randy, me…You’re hearing four basses on there…’

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Since Beyoncé’s fourth Vogue cover was announced, I’ve been thinking about how the Black press has always been where Black artists could have their work spoken about with integrity. Being Black could be simple matter of fact there, unencumbered by duty of explanation or self-defense. The burden of racism wasn’t the centerpiece or engine of every story. The humanity of subjects was not flattened, defanged, or made into spectacular monstrosity. Beyoncé hasn’t given a traditional magazine interview since 2013, presumably to get around some of these mainstream media tendencies. She has produced an increasingly complex body of visual, sound, and performance art, creating her own candid language. It made sense that the Vogue team would allow her “unprecedented control” of the editorial as reports claimed. The reports also let us know that for the first time in the magazine’s history, a Black photographer, Tyler Mitchell, would shoot its cover.

When the cover was revealed, however, editor-in-chief Anna Wintour told “Business of Fashion” that it was the Vogue team who’d been in control creatively. It had been their idea to initiate such a sea change for the magazine. Wintour, after all, was who’d made André Leon Talley the magazine’s first Black creative director in 1988. Writing about his tenure for the Washington Post, Talley said he “sounded no bullhorn over diversity.” Cover photography had been “entirely in the hands of others.” He takes a somewhat defensive position, but really, he doesn’t need to. Not even one Black photographer captivated the Vogue team enough in more than one hundred years. How could that have been mere oversight?

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beyonce-vogue

Condé Nast

In Mitchell’s finest image, Beyoncé is seated in a Southern Gothic tableau, in front of a plain white sheet, wearing a bridal gown and a crown of real flowers. It could be a still from Lemonade. I see the stare of a woman in refusal, though I’m not sure of what. Beyoncé’s artistry and vivacious attention to her own life is pregnant with history and memory — she’s at an apex of a long line of Black women in American entertainment. Dorothy Dandridge, whose singing voice was dubbed over in Carmen Jones. Lena Horne, whose work in musicals was sometimes deleted when the films screened in the South. Lauryn Hill, who disappeared from the spotlight at the height of her fame. The weight of all that is there, softly referenced in the images, directly in the cover story. But the critic Robin Givhan found an opaque, disappointing muteness in the cover image. “Nothing is divulged,” she wrote.

I think a lot about how journalists called Aretha Franklin a difficult person to interview. “Whatever you learn from Aretha when you sit down and talk to her, you’ve got to watch her onstage if you really want to know what she thinks and feels and agonizes about,” Ed Bradley said after speaking with her in 1990. In Respect, biographer David Ritz documented numerous times Franklin arranged interviews with Jet as counterpoint to an unfavorable report in another outlet.

Beyoncé’s Vogue photos are gorgeous, but I wonder what the editorial would have looked like if she’d truly trusted the publication’s creative team to support her. There’s still much to be desired in the way Black subjects, even the most distinguished and well-known, are portrayed in the mainstream. I’m fatigued by the hollow kind of diversity that tokenizes and the endless stories about racism and racial trauma. If I never again hear about how a Black or brown person has “taught” a white person something of moral value, I’d be pleased. In the not-so-distant past, glossies like Ebony, Jet, Vibe, The Source, and weekly papers like the Michigan Chronicle, and the Chicago Defender existed all at once. They had cachet and resources, and, importantly, a cauldron of Black editors and photographers and stylists who’d come up through the ranks. They created generative, textured counterpoints to mainstream narratives, and their teams were personally and institutionally invested in the growth, preservation, and rigorous interpretation of Black culture.

For better and for worse, and on the whole, they were trusted — to not denigrate, degrade, diminish, or exclude their subjects. To light them beautifully, to see, hear, and listen.

Ebony, Vibe, Essence and many local newspapers such as the Michigan Chronicle, the Chicago Defender, the St. Louis American and the Tri-State Defender are still publishing. Much of the archives of Ebony, Jet, and Negro Digest are available digitally via Google Books. The Obsidian Collection is digitizing the archive of many legacy Black newspapers. Digital-first publications such as CASSIUSOkayplayer, the Grio, and the Root do excellent work. But the media landscape has contracted and consolidated. Some Black outlets have shut down. Many of those that remain are unable to publish with the cadence they once did. Much Black talent is scattered about. Diversity is universally in, at least in this moment. It has become a business imperative for mainstream publications. That’s a win and a progression. But it has come with a cost.