Page 180 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

174 CULTURAL STUDIES

narrative of my reading of Present Tense while on the road with my own struggling
rock & roll band.

Thursday, November 2nd

We were scheduled to play at Otto’s in DeKalb, Illinois, a town that boasts of
Northern Illinois University and the world’s most awesome corn seed as its two
major claims to fame. The band met at noon to load gear and was on the road by
1:30, cranking northwards on route 65, heading for what would surely be a
rewarding gig (we based our assumption on the fact that we had confirmed
‘press’ in two separate papers and confirmed radio play on the college station;
rule #1 is that press isn’t a guarantee, but it sure helps). The only problem here was
that our transmission decided to fall out; literally, it started to grind and mash and
wheeze and before you knew it there we were on the shoulder wondering what
the hell went wrong. After a tow job (courtesy of State Farm insurance—all
bands must have towing insurance, it’s kind of an unwritten law) and an
inspection by the guys at Guaranteed Transmissions (‘Get it done right the First
Time!’) we were informed that we were looking at about a $1,000 repair job
which, ‘at the earliest, might be done tomorrow afternoon’. U-haul was out of
rental vans, no one would rent us a truck at a price affordable to anyone who isn’t
an IMF shyster, and we have too much gear for all of our friends’ borrowed cars
strapped together, so there you have it: lotsa press, a nice club, 80 per cent of the
door, a warm, glowing afternoon for travelling, and by 5:00 I was home in bed
cursing the bastards from Dodge and cracking open Present Tense.
The first substantive essay in Present Tense is Robert Palmer’s ‘The Church
of the Sonic Guitar,’ a loving tribute to the players who have contributed to the
construction, sanctification, and continual regeneration of our culture’s mania for
guitars and guitarists. Palmer constructs a winding history that meanders from
the leading players of ‘the Southwest’s white western swing bands’, such as Bob
Dunn and Leon McAuliffe, into Texas blues legends T-Bone Walker, Guitar
Slim, and Clarence Gatemouth Brown; from early Jazz players such as Charlie
Christian into the Chicago sounds of Muddy Waters and St Louis’ Ike Turner
and Chuck Berry. Palmer also discusses the crucial role played by Sam Phillips,
who—along with founding Sun Studios in Memphis in 1953—was one of the
central figures in coopting the many sounds of Black artists for a mainstream
white audience, and the industry’s first rock & roll producer to wield power as
both artistic director and business manager. The essay is therefore a quick history
of the evolution/co-optation of various indigenous regional musical styles into
the more homogeneous (and therefore marketable) genre of ‘rock & roll’.
I have two problems with Palmer’s essay. First, he links the chosen players in
a sort of mythical lineage of great men, without explaining in any detail why
these players, stylistically, musically, made the impact that they did. Second, it
strikes me that a crucial question to ask this essay is ‘what about the evil,
machismo-pumping demons that haunt this “church”?’ I would argue that with