Interview
April 1994
Reading Sweet Nothings, an anthology of poems about rock ’n’ roll, I kept thinking about two scenes in Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father.
In the first, the Daniel Day-Lewis character, Belfast petty thief Gerry Conlon, is running from cops and soldiers. As he hurls himself down tiny back alleys, the huge, devouring chords of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” pursue him like a dinosaur in King Kong. Hendrix’s guitar might be a mouth with fire coming out of it: his noise, his presence, is all over Conlon, breathing down his back, laughing in his face, tangling his feet. The chase is thrilling, scary, and the music is just right—it adds so much. Still, that’s all it does. The use of the Hendrix tune is a simple, conventional orchestration, the sort of thing you can find anywhere. You’ve seen it before—for that matter, you’ve seen it in a sequence in The Harder They Come that uses the Maytals’ “Pressure Drop” on Jimmy Cliff in exactly the same way.
The second scene comes shortly after. Gerry Conlon’s stolid, responsible father has decided to get his good-for-nothing son out of Belfast and send him to London. Conlon’s all for it: London 1974, still full of hippies and squats, drugs and free love. He can’t wait. He boards a ferry out of Belfast, meets a friend. They get beers, drop a coin in the jukebox, and as the first notes of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” come on, they hoist their glasses in a toast to their new adventures, to life in a new land.
Here the music does not orchestrate what the actors are doing; they are orchestrating the music. The chase could exist without Hendrix; this scene could not exist without the sound on the screen. All Sheridan uses is the fanfare that opens the song—that thick, swirling, implacable rising tide of hope and fate, promise and threat. It’s just Dylan’s band taking its first steps into the song, as Conlon and his friend are taking their first steps; the music is faded off the soundtrack as Dylan begins to sing. The event is so strong, so emotionally lucid, it can take you right out of the story, freezing this perfect moment, this tiny utopia that, over the next hour or so, will be torn to pieces.
There are orchestrations like Sheridan’s use of Hendrix among the poems in Sweet Nothings: An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry, as with Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Hanoi Hannah,” where a North Vietnamese DJ harangues GIs waiting for the next attack: “Her knife-edge song cuts / deep as a sniper’s bullet.” When the music is simply used, you get the equivalent of bad rock criticism. It’s the instances when poets make room for a song to make its own claim in a new way that make the book sing, that let it remind you of your own experiences as a listener trying to hold on to one of those instantaneous musical utopias as it vanished. The example I keep coming back to is David Rivard’s “Cures.”
A man and a woman are sitting in their living room, after a fight that’s left them disgusted, ashamed, and bored. They’ve turned the stereo up to drown their own thoughts; for some reason they’re playing “Mystery Train,” “where Elvis relates some dark to himself.” The scene doesn’t develop; it just sits there, like the two people, “each doubt a little larger / than desire.”
The poem goes on, but Rivard has closed it with those lines; as the couple listen to this song of movement, of danger, fear, lust, chase, and triumph, it freezes them, shows the depth of their paralysis. Each doubt a little larger than desire, and the longer each doubt lasts, the larger it grows.
This wasn’t why Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips made “Mystery Train” in Memphis in 1955, presumably: to expose people to their own weakness. But people don’t use songs according to anyone’s intent. In their truest moments, songs, like microbes—without intent, without brains—use people. The real mystery Rivard’s poem opens up has nothing to do with a train; it’s about the way songs enter people’s lives, the way people can’t get them out. Their beauty, at its most intense, might be more a rebuke than a promise. In “Cures,” it’s the passion and the heedlessness of the music that define how much the two people listening have given up, how much they’ve given up on each other, on themselves—just as the jukebox notes in In the Name of the Father, lifting like a curtain in a theater, define the preciousness of everything that’s about to be taken away.
Sweet Nothings—An Anthology of Rock and Roll in American Poetry, ed.
Jim Elledge. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994.