The Last Rock Star Book Or: Liz Phair,
a Rant
By Camden Joy
Verse Chorus Press
210 pages

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AN ACCIDENTAL OBSESSION | PAGE 1, 2
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I know the first thing you want to know is all that Holden Caulfield kind of crap, but that's not where my story starts. It starts with this idea that everything in my youth was suffused with futility. As a youngster, I'd hear that these were the best years of my life and I'd know, just know, that this was a complete lie. I'd hear about how I had my whole life in front of me though I knew clear as could be there was nothing the hell in front of me. What were they talking about? How dumb did I look? And please note I did not begin here by saying, "Everything in my youth was suffused with futility except rock and roll." No, I'm sorry. Rock and roll seemed just as futile and stupid as anything. To say merely that we felt a little let down by rock and roll would be about like saying the Japanese felt a little let down when they lost World War Two. By the time we inherited it, what could anyone say was really so great about rock and roll? Either you're some naive longhair or you're some humorless skinhead, either you're nothing but beautiful or you're everything and pompous. When there are still Gabriel Snells publishing pretty picture books to argue that the Doors were actually good or Jim Morrison was actually smart, leaving people to close the book swearing that Morrison was our culture's phallus and his band the American orgasm, when this crap is what they call rock and roll, how can you say rock and roll is still significant? Well, I'm sorry, it isn't. At best, there might be a few good seconds in a couple of rock-and-roll songs -- some choice snippets, an occasional subtlety, an incorruptible fragment, but that's really about it.

When I was young, we approached rock and roll like that, that it had been broken open and sucked dry by greedy adults and nothing remained of it but a few shards. The Rolling Stones, for example, could be reduced to the mumbles and guitar jabs at the start of "Stray Cat Blues," the submerged clatter of "I Just Wanna See His Face," and the line in "Respectable" about smoking heroin with the president. Three fragments. And I'd have to say that even that was pretty generous of us. The Clash and the Who were each reduced to just two fragments. My friends and I called these "moments," and we constantly bickered over the merits of this or that "moment." I'm the one who said the moments occur when a performer strays from the script, when you sense they haven't practiced this part but aren't worried what to play. It was Roy who said these moments were "steered entirely by the majesty of impulse." I always loved that, "the majesty of impulse." Made passion sound like some kinda key to royalty.

I even played rock and roll, for a long time tried to get a band happening with Acey. We knew this thing about "moments," and we struggled ourselves to attain the majesty of impulse, but it never worked right. It was a great idea when you applied it to other people's songs, but you couldn't consciously start out aiming for it or you'd never get there. Probably there's some Chinese proverb that beautifully captures the frustration of this phenomenon, but I've never found it. The high school I went to was not particularly big on teaching us Chinese proverbs.

To go back to Liz Phair for a second. I honestly want to say I recollect her, but it's like looking over a familiar scrapbook -- you can't tell if you really remember the original events or if it's just that the pictures make you think you do (when we count one to ten, this fellow patient once explained to me, we do not actually count but just repeat words we learned long ago). I do have more than a little trouble distinguishing memories of this Liz Phair from (say) Lisa Germano or Lisa Loeb or Lisa Bonet, not to mention others I've overheard people talking about, like Joan Osborne and Alanis Morissette and Tori Amos. I repeat the name over and over (Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Liz Phair) to see what it kicks loose. I'm not a total ignoramus, I have flipped through more than a few popular magazines in the places I've wound up. Was she the twiggy one with accusatory lyrics and the weak voice, was she the shirtless, top-heavy punk chick who wore electrical tape on her nipples? Was her chosen topic for interviews the Princess Syndrome, or the methods employed by post-capitalist revanchist society to keep women barefoot and pregnant, or lost-little-girl dreams of Barbie betrothals and flying horses with horns? Did her albums show her furious at men who revealed an overt incomprehension of her polygamous desires by terming her a "slut," or did she basically just perform nonsense poetry backed by two loud bass guitars and a fiddle? Which Liz Phair was she, the one with some sort of Christ affliction who complimented soul singers of the sixties, or the willing one wearing nothing but a teeny pink tube top and black pants, placed on the page of an important music magazine as their near-nudie encouragement to resubscribe? Long-legged, crooning her synth-dance hits, always in sunglasses, so tall she made the natives tremble, always lovely in vinyl wrap-around skirts even long after new wave was passé -- was that Liz Phair, with the breasts too big to truly believe?

And what's with this "reluctant star" bit? Given the situation, one would think her early interviews would reflect a measure of delight at having been in the eye of so many beholders, the eye in a tornado of bids.

Did she not want to get famous?

Did she not realize that thousands of musicians are killing themselves to get the kind of recognition she got (I was one!)? Seeking notoriety, they snap their souls like chicken bones and feign total casualness as the marrow is laid open. They send out demos and flyers and practice day in, day out, they bore their friends by speaking of nothing else, they consciously write songs to appeal to the broadest audience (if they are gay or Jewish or intelligent they do not mention it), they waste no moment, they map out song arrangements on their laps while taking a crap (that was me!), lunch breaks are spent on the telephone to local rock writers, recording studios, managers, record companies, music-store owners, clubs, they carry portable Pocket Secretarys exactly like the one I'm holding now, on which they dictate every melody that occurs to them (lacking this, they will call home and sing it to their answering machine), they concoct crazy schemes to get tapes to celebrities, they plead with booking agents to put every A & R rep on their guest list, they enshrine each set list in wax paper to document the Salad Days. They work to develop an attitude. They deride bands who use songs to curse and complain as acting "fed up," they scoff at bands who are iconoclastic and independent as "collegey," they dismiss singer-songwriters as "topical." When just for the heck of it their drummer suggests they play a show completely naked, they grow so frustrated at his weirdness they almost kick him out of the band, until they read that some other cool band got famous playing naked and then they consider it. When someone claiming to be a record producer agrees to find them shows if they pay him $500 for each gig, they consider themselves lucky; when this supposed record producer suggests they revamp their material and play mostly nonoriginal tunes, they earnestly implement his advice; when he buys them silly outfits, they proudly wear them (after all, the Beatles did it for Brian Epstein); and when they find they are booked into a birthday party at a supper club where they are obliged to buy a meal and pay for their own drinks and the audience leaves after they finish a completely ordinary version of "Happy Birthday" and the "record producer" takes the proceeds and says he'll call them ... they still don't get it (this actually happened). The next day they are at it again, laying themselves open for the taking, hinting there is nothing they wouldn't do for a chance at the Big Time ...

"The Reluctant Star" -- the phrase yearns for independence, as though no one ever informed Liz Phair of the impossibility of maintaining such a thing in the supermarket that is the United States of America. The article's title makes me think she quaintly did not realize that when you call for change in America they do not hate you but love you for it, they love you until you can't see straight, their hearts brim over with love until they love the change right out of you. But I doubt people told her that; compromise would've dampened what I imagine to be the spirits of this Liz Phair.

You can almost hear the reluctant star wishing this fate on someone else: why me? why me? You can almost imagine her praying that if this is what it is to be a rock star -- interviews every hour with nervous admirers and phone calls every day from eager stockbrokers -- well then, so be it, she will be this rock star they seem to want so badly, but let her be the last rock star, and let this toll never be inflicted on another. Let none come after. Even if I do not last, she prays -- for I will not last so long -- at least let me burn so brightly before I fade that like a pure candle lit and put to the tabloid page this world emerges from flames a better place -- though tattered -- though lost -- in victory -- we're free.

The reluctant star. I mean, really, how quaint.
SALON | Oct. 5, 1998

Copyrighted with permission, Verse Chorus Press, 1998.