Book Feature

It’s not every day a run-of-the-mill rock critic gets the chance to talk shop with a major American poet, but that’s just what I did last week at the invitation of David Wojahn, author of seven books of contemporary poetry, including Interrogation Palace (finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize) and by far the best book of verse on the subject of rock and roll, Mystery Train.

First released in 1990, Mystery Train contains a series of thirty-five poems that follow the development of rock music and American culture from 1956 to 1988, creating what the author calls “a soundtrack to American history.” But it also tells the personal story of a young boy first initiated into the mysteries of popular culture, who watches in awe as the music grows to new heights of bombast and revolution, and finally comes of age to see the broader meanings of the music and musicians he’d once held on such high pedestals. Each of the sonnets tell a short story all their own — some of them true, some of them anecdotal — and Wojahn’s clear, playful language brings to life characters as diverse as rock stars, congressmen, and state hospital nurses.

The poems bring moments of rock-and-roll lore to life with irony and insight. Just check out the incisive way Wojahn cuts to the core of a society reaching the end of one era and the beginning of another:

“American Bandstand” Dance Contest,
                Semi-Finals, 1966

The couples bob with numbers pasted on their backs.
The girls, hair long and straight as Jeanie Shrimpton’s,

Primly shake;
       the boys in cautious Beatle cuts
Jerk their heads back to show off their bangs.

This antique,
       prepsychedelic contest
Will earn the winning couple matching ‘66

Mustang converts, and Paul Revere and the Raiders, dressed
In powdered wigs, will play their high school dance.

Cut back to Dick Clark—
                in his arms a giant tube
Of Clearasil, the lead-in for a station break.

He peddles innocence like water from Lourdes,
And even now must keep his age a secret
                                                                   (38).

Black and white across twelve million sets
The babyface-lifted smile,
       ghostly, breaks.

In the first poem, our narrator hides under the covers listening to James Brown on a portable transistor radio. A little later, the Godfather of Soul himself makes an entrance, where he is violently accosted by Southern policemen in the middle of a 1958 tour. The Beatles perform a shabby concert in a surreal German club during their early days. Meanwhile, an upstart Bob Dylan sings to his bedridden hero, Woody Guthrie. “Guthrie’s due for a comeback,” Wojahn pointed out as we discussed that particular scene. “If you look at the direction this country is going, the combination of Guthrie’s honesty and chutzpah is just what this generation needs.”

And Wojahn isn’t writing just to see words on a page, either. He’s a firm believer in the power of language to help change the world for the better. “Isn’t that what rock and roll tried to do in the sixties and seventies?” I asked.

“Absolutely. And at the time I believed that popular music could be a revolutionary force — or I believed the people who believed it, the musicians. Maybe it was true. Maybe it can be.”

“A lot of the poems tell of moments when the revolutionary side of rock music was being co-opted by marketing, or, in the case of the Trashmen shaking hands with Hubert Humphrey, the people in power. Is this what held rock music back from making real change?”

Wojahn is a beatific-looking fellow in round eyeglasses, with a short beard as silver-white as the shock of hair on his head. When he laughs, his eyes squint down and disappear. “You know, I grew up in Minnesota. That’s where the Trashmen were from. They’d never even seen an ocean, and here they were with this hit surf record, “Surfin’ Bird.” And it stands as one of the best garage-band songs to this day. But yeah, the main problem is that our society tends to debase a lot of cultural expression by turning art into products — or even marketing jingles. When something authentic comes around, aspects of our society always demand that it be tamed. You have great moments or great records that really signal a stylistic high-point, but the ideas contained in them get watered down in stages, and finally the most popular acts are those two or three stages removed from their inspiration.”

As examples of this process, Wojahn noted the way punk rock’s biggest statements — like the Clash’s London Calling or Patti Smith’s Horses —have been watered down to contemporary pop groups like the All-American Rejects or Blink-182, who can cash in on a vague rendition of the punk image without bothering with all the creativity and revolution. Similarly, he noted the way Dylan’s masterpieces somehow inspired the singer-songwriter movement of the seventies. “Blonde on Blonde,” Wojahn pointed out, “is probably the high modernist pinnacle of rock music.”

“Dylan is one hell of a songwriter. He’s also on the cover of the book. Would you say that he influenced you when you sat down to write Mystery Train?”

“Well, I wrote most of Mystery Train while in Europe in the late Eighties. I was struck with nostalgia for American culture, and nobody seemed to be taking this music seriously — not poets, at least.” Here Wojahn pointed in the general direction of several bookcases behind him in his cramped, white-walled office. “Poets usually won’t admit to it,” he confided, “but most anyone of my generation who writes was influenced by Dylan. Even if they didn’t try to copy his style, it was his presence, his lyrics, that made average young Americans decide that being a writer or being a poet was cool.” He laughed again. “Think of how many millions of times someone has heard the names of Pound, Eliot, or Fitzgerald in a Dylan song and then searched out those writers’ work.”

“Dylan took poetry pretty seriously.”

“Yes,” Wojahn said. “So did Lou Reed. You’ve got Dylan digging Ginsberg and Reed digging Delmore Schwartz, and then you have both of those songwriters inspiring their listeners — not just to pick up guitars, but to pick up the pen and paper.”

Through the middle of the book, starting with Elvis’ legendary TV-shooting, the poems take a violent turn. Charles Manson is recorded in an L.A. studio. Brian Jones awaits death at poolside. The aftermath of the Stones’ Altamont concert is visited. And in Vietnam, the horrors of war come alive to a soundtrack of “Proud Mary.” I asked the poet about this violence and what it meant to the book as a whole.

“Vietnam was the first time war was really brought home. Anywhere you looked, America was at war, and it didn’t look good. Television actually showed this stuff, not like now, and the reality of it couldn’t be missed. At the same time, you’ve got this liberating force of rock music coming to a peak. It seemed to work against the grain of all the negative imagery we were getting, but at the same time, it was all one experience. When I look back, it’s hard to separate the two, even though they were so opposed.”

“Towards the end of the book, the narrator seems to take a disillusioned look at the myth of rock and roll, where in the beginning he saw it as so genuine. What’s happened?”

“We all have a ‘transforming moment,’ I think, when music really speaks to us for the first time and you realize it can change your life. But by the eighties, it was apparent that a lot of what had once had so much inspirational power had been made sort of laughable.” He notes Madame Tussuad’s wax re-figuring of John Lennon’s assassination (featured in one of Wojahn’s most famous poems), Elvis’ home becoming a cheap tourist attraction, and many other strange aspects of eighties culture that seemed to make a joke of once important things. “As a culture, we seemed intent on wrecking the authenticity that is at the heart of our best artistic achievements.”

“Is that maybe the central message — that authenticity still matters?”

The poet’s eyes squinted up again in a smile. “Authenticity is what ties the great works from the past together with this current indie-rock movement. It’s about making an honest stab into the darkness rather than just following along with trends. It’s something we could all use a little more of these days.”

Mystery Train is available from the University of Pittsburgh Press or Amazon.com.

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