Free History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs by Greil Marcus Page A

on earth, no one is offended. The opposite is true: as with Rick Perlstein’s Romney, the falsity itself, felt and embraced, delivers its own kind of gratification, its own thrill.
    That, at the Super Bowl, for nearly fourteen minutes, as in almost her entire career, was what Beyoncé had to say. She seemed someone entirely composed of money. Her gorgeousness was a concept, and as a concept it was automatic and finally bland. Unlike Elvis, Little Richard, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, or Lady Gaga, she divided no one from anyone else. You didn’t have to have an opinion about her; you only had to acknowledge her mastery, and it was impossible not to, even though the longer you looked, the less there was to see.
    The first two words of Etta James’s “All I Could Do Was Cry,” from 1960, are the most devastating. She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938; at fifteen, living in San Francisco, she formed a vocal trio. Johnny Otis was in town with his band; after a hotel-room audition, James fakeda permission note from her mother, lied about her age, with Otis went back to Los Angeles and cut an answer-record to Hank Ballard’s huge hit “Work with Me Annie”: “The Wallflower (Roll with Me Henry),” with the parenthetical changed to “Dance with Me” when DJs objected. In 1955 it was number 1 on the R&B charts for a solid month. As covered by the radio singer Georgia Gibbs, it was number 1 on the pop charts. James spent the next five years on the road, sharing stages with Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and Elvis Presley, writing songs, making more than a dozen singles, and falling farther into a barely adult oblivion, sleeping on buses, and learning the codes and disguises that came with marijuana, cocaine, and heroin: “I liked to see the needle stuck in the vein between hits,” she wrote years later, with a double meaning that could have hung over most of her career. In 1960 she was hired at Chess Records in Chicago as a staff writer and singer. “All I Could Do Was Cry,” her first single on her own for the company, was a number 2 R&B hit. The next year a version of “At Last,” once a big-band hit for Glenn Miller with country-club vocals, now a chiming soul ballad, was another number 2—though over the years, as it reappeared in movies, TV commercials, covers by Celine Dion and other singers, it became an inescapable standard, and finally a self-erasing cliché, as if James had never done anything else, as if she’d never written “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
    “ IIIIIIII heard”—with a tone as rich and deep as any in rock ’n’ roll, James doesn’t so much sing the opening words of “All I Could Do Was Cry” as let them out, stones hidden in her lungs for twenty years. As the guitarist John Fahey once wrote of the first line of Hank Williams’s “Alone and Forsaken”—“We met in the springtime”—“By the fifth word, you know it’s all over,” and here it only takes two. “It is enough to shrivel the heart to see,” James Agee wrote of the last shots of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, back-and-forth close-ups of the once-blind girl recognizing that her benefactor is not the rich man she imagined but the ruined, filthy tramp who now recognizes himself in her gaze, and this studied moment, in which the singer’s whole life, her future as well as her past, seems to float behind her eyes as she sings, is the same.
    James was twenty-two; she could have been sixty, or have lived a dozen lives without reaching twenty-three and remembered all of them. “I heard church bells ringing,” “All I Could Do Was Cry” begins; the singer’s beloved is walking down the aisle with another woman. It’s a hundred soap operas, a thousand other songs. Here the chorus is shapely and elegant, the verses off-balance, the “Earth Angel” triplets on guitar and piano an anachronism, the backing singers a distraction. None of it matters. They met in the springtime: in