Free Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus Page B

version of it. It was also something new under the sun: a new sound.
IT’S THE OLDEST
    It’s the oldest hype in the book—and the page that can’t be footnoted. After thirty years of rock ’n’ roll there are plenty of footnotes: collectors’ albums that allow a listener to go back in time, enter the studio that no longer exists, and hear the new sound as it was discovered, flubbed, or even denied. It is a displacing experience.
    In Chicago in 1957, trying to cut “Little Village,” bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson and his white producer get into an argument over just what, exactly, constitutes a village—an argument resolved only when Williamson shouts, “Little
village,
motherfucker! You name it after yo’ mammy if you like!” As a footnote, this explains why Williamson proceeds to take up much of the song with a discussion of what distinguishes a village from a hamlet, a town, or a city; it also explains a great deal about the evolution of the master-slave relationship. In Memphis in 1954, guitarist Scotty Moore responds to a slow, sensual early take of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” by calling nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley a nigger; three years later in the same spot, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Phillips engage in an hysterical donnybrook over the question of rock ’n’ roll as music of salvation or damnation. These moments explain most of American culture.
    In 1959 in New Orleans, Jimmy Clanton, much loathed over the years as a classic example of the white pretty boy who forced authentic black rockers into oblivion, begins “Go, Jimmy, Go,” his most loathsome hit. He pauses: “Bop bop bop ba da da,” he lilts to the control booth. “Am I singing Mickey Mouse enough yet?” “A little bit more!” comes the answer. “Geez, I’m not Frankie Avalon,” says Clanton, just before turning himself into Frankie Avalon. This explains that Clanton’s heart was in the right place.
    Again in Chicago in 1957, Chuck Berry is about to make another run at “Johnny B. Goode.” “Take three!” shouts the producer. “Gotta be good!” Berry and his band lean into the tune, but the opening passage—in the version that made the charts, the most deliciously explosive opening in rock ’n’ roll—isn’t there. The structure is there, the chords, the notes, everything one could write down on a lead sheet, but the music is battened by a queer languor, a hesitation, a hedged bet. Then one changes records and listens to“Johnny B. Goode” as it has been on the radio since 1958: those notes and chords have grown into a fact that throws off all footnotes. They hit.
    And one can listen to
The Great Rock
’
n
’
Roll Swindle,
a two-record documentary of the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols, orchestrated by Malcolm McLaren to prove that the panicky adventures he and the band lived out were part of a plot he had scripted long in advance. The idea this set of footnotes means to get across is that the story of the Sex Pistols—the sudden gulp of social life into the throat of a hunched boy calling himself an antichrist—was from the beginning conceived and delivered as a mere shuck, McLaren’s little joke on the world. If Johnny Rotten really meant it when he railed “We
mean
it, man!” in “God Save the Queen,” then the joke was on him, or on anyone who believed what he said.
    It’s a good try. Released in 1979, a year after the Sex Pistols had ceased to be,
The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle
includes a lumbering “God Save the Queen Symphony” with fey narration, various depressing post–Sex Pistols rave-ups by the then nearly late Sid Vicious, “Anarchy in the U.K.” done in the manner of Michel Legrand and sung entirely in French by one Jerzimy, and a medley of Pistols hits by a happy-feet disco group. Both the French and disco numbers are actually quite appealing: “Pretty Vacant” recast as elevator music is not an uninspired fantasy. But McLaren’s effort to show up the Sex Pistols as a con (the secret