"Lipstick Traces": Were The Sex Pistols As Important As The Beatles?

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century by Greil Marcus. 497 pp. Harvard University Press. $24.95 (paperback)

Were the Sex Pistols, the English punk band that sang that the Queen “ain’t no human being” and there’s “no future” in England, as important as the Beatles or Elvis? According to Greil Marcus (whose “Like a Rolling Stone” was reviewed here) they were. He views them in "Lipstick Traces" as among those “appealing and disturbing” performers “who “raise the possibility of living in a new way.”

While ranking the Sex Pistols among two major rock icons is a dubious notion, Marcus goes beyond music in making a case for the band’s importance. He views them as inheritors of rebellious 20th century cultural and political movements, specifically the Dadaists and the French Lettrists and Situationists (the former gave rise to the latter). It’s not that the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten or Sid Vicious were well versed in these movements; Marcus contends that the two punk rockers absorbed their influence as part of the century’s cultural climate, its “secret history.”

What the Sex Pistols shared, in this view, was a sense of negation toward Western civilization, a nihilistic rebellion: “[Johnny Rotten’s] aim was to make the world doubt its most cherished and unexamined beliefs; to make the world pay for its crimes in the coin of nightmare, and then to end the world…” Marcus finds the same impulse in the Dadaists, for whom traditional forms of art made no sense following World War I: “art had to be destroyed…because it was a ‘moral safety valve,’ a mechanism for the unlimited ability of the human mind to turn its worst fantasies into real-life atrocities, then to turn its worst atrocities into pretty pictures.” The Lettrists and the Situationists, movements that influenced the French student rebellion of May 1968, are defined as “a revolt against society’s idea of happiness, against the ideology of survival, a revolt against a world where every rise in the standard of living meant a rise in the ‘standard of boredom.' ”

Marcus presents an original and challenging exploration of the social conditions that gave birth to punk rock and the Dadaists, and the connections between them. The last third of the book, which he devotes to the Lettrists and Situationists, is less successful. Here his digressive, metaphorical style bogs down, and the movements' aims and connections to the book’s theme are not always clear. Still, there’s no one like Marcus for taking a seemingly obscure influence or an iconoclastic notion and making it intellectually exciting (his “Mystery Train” remains one of the greatest books on rock). In the majority of “Lipstick Traces,” Marcus reveals the “secretive” influence behind 20th century movements in a way that makes them more monumental than previously imagined.

Dylan's Anthem Of Freedom Promised "No Direction Home"

Like A Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan At The Crossroads by Greil Marcus. Illustrated. 286 pp. Public Affairs. $14.00 (paperback)

Is one song a viable focus for a book almost 300 pages long? Yes, if the study is written by music and cultural historian Greil Marcus and if the song is Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone," listed by Rolling Stone Magazine as number 1 on their "500 Greatest Songs of All Time."

Marcus recounts how the song was part of Dylan's penchant for defying expectations. "Like A Rolling Stone" was composed during the period when he threw off the folk purists by pioneering the folk rock sound, for which he was booed at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 and the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, in 1966. 

It wasn't just the folkies who were upended by Dylan's compositions; it was also the pop music teams of Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, and Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. Said Goffin, "I wish we had tried more to write some songs that–really meant something... Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was able to do: put poetry in rock 'n' roll, and just stand up there like a mensch and sing it." Elvis Costello registered the song's impact: "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like A Rolling Stone.' "

The shock of the song brought with it various interpretations of this portrait of a spoiled young woman who found herself on the streets, among the very people she once looked upon with condescension. Some saw the song as self-righteous put-down, "refusing women any middle ground between the pedestal and the gutter" or "sneeringly and contemptuously sung to a spoiled rich girl" with "the reactionary stagnation of the social order...personified as female."

The song that promises "no direction home" can also be viewed, however, as an anthem of freedom, especially in the context of the 1960s. Rolling Stone Magazine founder Jann Wenner offered this perspective: "So now you're without a home, you're on your own, complete unknown, like a rolling stone. That's a liberating thing. This is a song about liberation. About being liberated from your own hangups, your old knowledge, and the fear, the frightening part of facing that." On a broader level, Wenner applied the song to "a comfortable society suddenly discovering what's going on in Vietnam–the society we're taught about, and you realize, as you become aware, drug aware, socially aware, the disaster of the commercial society." Marcus agrees with this perspective: "Confused–and justified, exultant, free from history with a world to win–is exactly where the song means to leave you."

Marcus's depictions of the musical traditions and landscapes of America can rise to pure poetry. "Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's first folk music hero" is described as a "troubadour of the dispossessed, poet of the Great Depression, ghost of the American highway, a man blown by the wind and made out of dust." Highway 61, which took Dylan to cities where he discovered folk music, "...would have seemed to go to the ends of the earth, carrying the oldest strains of American music along with businessmen and escaped cons, vacationers and joy-riders blasting the radio–carrying runaway slaves north before the long highway had a single name, and, not so much more than a century later, carrying Freedom Riders south."

The descriptions of the studio sessions leave an impression of the contingent nature of recordings. The musicians were fumbling around with the song until they came upon the single take that did it justice. Al Kooper was originally not even supposed to be part of the ensemble, but he happened to be in the studio and sat down at the organ. One also hears fresh elements of the song after reading the book: blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield's leads that form a bridge between stanzas, or the sound of the tambourine throughout. Forty-four years later, "Like A Rolling Stone" can be discovered anew, as is always the case with great art.

Suggestions for further reading:

• "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'N' Roll Music" by Greil Marcus

• "Down The Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan" by Howard Sounes

• "Positively Fourth Street" by David Hadju

• "Chronicles: Volume One" by Bob Dylan