In film and painting, dance and theater, even most forms of music, the deep, wise, elderly artist is a touchstone, a hero. But a mature rock ‘n’ roller is an oxymoron. The only honorable option for an aging rock star is to retreat to some island somewhere and grow old gracefully, but instead there’s a growing population of middle-aged rock figures who put me in mind of no one so much as Norman Mailer–pushy and arrogant, ruthlessly trafficking in long-ago triumphs, growing fatter, more opinionated, and less coherent as time goes on. Lacking England’s traditions of critical invective, the American press just acquiesces; since people over here don’t like to read, much less read what they don’t want to hear, it’s easier just to recycle, with stories like “The Stones Roll On,” or “Bowie Does It Again,” or “The Who’s Greatest Show.” All the rest of us can do is stare in disbelief as tired old hack after tired old hack gets trotted out for the feature pages yet again.
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Of course Reed is an original; in his early solo years he alternated brutal hard rockers with softer but scorching acoustic numbers, all the while indulging a taste for the, ah, exotic that made David Bowie look like a prude. His first seven or eight solo records were frequently excoriated by critics, both for Reed’s occasionally careless songwriting and because of a widely-ascribed-to view that Reed held his audience in contempt; the latter was seemingly confirmed with the release of the notorious Metal Machine Music, an audacious, if accurately titled, two-album set of nothing but anonymous metallic clanking and humming.
That album’s liner notes contain, ironically enough, one of Reed’s most interesting pieces of writing. Grandiose to be sure, and certainly snotty, the notes see Reed trying to make a case for his solo work: “The records were letters,” he writes. “Real letters from me to certain other people. Who had and still have, basically, no music, be it verbal or instrumental, to listen to.” And the four full sides of monstrous clanking? “It is the only recorded work I know of seriously done as well as possible as a gift, if one could call it that, from a part of [a] certain head, to a few others. . . . For those for whom the needle is no more than a toothbrush.”
The first hurdle, believe it or not, is the titles of the songs. Each has a name and a sort of identifying label: “No Chance–Regret,” “Gassed and Stoked–Loss.” They’re kind of like Hallmark Card categories (“Sorrow–Pet Death”) and get old very quickly, along with all of the record’s other hoary elements, including a short instrumental rave up that kicks things off (“Dorita–The Spirit”), a reprise (“Power and Glory–The Situation” and “Power and Glory, Part II–Magic–Transformation”), and a big record-closing title song (“Magic and Loss–The Summation”). That number ends with the line, “There’s a little magic in everything / And then some loss to even things out.” Hey, Lou, the love you take, ya know?
Corcoran, a nationally known bad-boy critic who’d written a series of loopy profiles and humor pieces for Spin and a notorious column, “Don’t You Start Me Talkin’,” in the Texas weekly the Austin Chronicle, had been on best behavior during his free-lance gig at the Sun-Times, and made no bones about wanting to be hired as a full-time critic in the third-largest media market in the country. Over his two years at the paper he produced thoughtful articles on everyone from Sinatra to Metallica and still managed to wield a wicked pen when he needed to. (On Bob Seger’s The Fire Inside: “Produced by the aptly named Don Was. Seger was a good singer.”) Less than sanguine about his future at the paper, last month he accepted a job as country critic at the Dallas Morning News. (The paper recently swallowed its competition, the Times-Herald, and has been busily expanding.)
Evidently the Sun-Times’s elders are aware of some of the entertainment section’s problems, and there is talk that they’ve resolved to hire a new critic. Before he left, Corcoran let them know he was going, and why. Startled, one of the Sun-Times’s top editors suggested that the paper might match the Morning News’s offer. The 35-year-old Corcoran, a struggling free-lancer for more than ten years, shook his head, marveling at a world that offered him either no job or two. He voted with his feet, and went to Dallas.
