Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: An Anthology
In the middle of Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay, a new anthology edited by University of Florida journalism professor William McKeen, there is a photo of Bob Dylan taken at a mid-60s press conference. He’s wearing a black corduroy jacket over a polka-dot shirt, and though the harsh lighting of the room may have something to do with it, he looks like hell–his skin is pasty, his eyes unfocused, his hair not just wild but obviously untended. He looks like he’s been up for three days, and his facial expression is that of a man struggling to remain cogent. It’s one of the worst photographs of Dylan I’ve ever seen. But the blurb below it reads: “Here’s his Bobness, resplendent in polka dots and trademark smirk, toying with reporters at a press conference during his brief season as the king of rock and roll in the mid-1960s.”
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Right there in a nutshell is everything that’s wrong with this book. A hefty 672-page tome, Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay is something like the Oasis of rock-writing collections: relentlessly upbeat, shameless in its blind idolatry, and, if you’re in any way familiar with this kind of thing already, patently underwhelming. Its message is its title, no more and no less. This is not a book in which rock’s myths are poked with a sharp stick. So what if Dylan looks like shit in that photograph? He’s fuckin’ Dylan, man!
Perhaps McKeen’s mistake was to try to make Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay both a historical overview and a literary anthology. As flawed as Clinton Heylin’s 1993 Penguin Book of Rock & Roll Writing (reissued last year by Da Capo, with the appropriate title change) might be, it’s got a distinct guiding sensibility. Though Heylin likes hyperbole as much as McKeen does (as evidenced by the contemporaneous reviews of Patti Smith’s Horses and Television’s Marquee Moon), he’s also willing to question the status of a classic (Richard Goldstein’s famous dis of Sgt. Pepper’s) or mock a hero (Lester Bangs’s posthumous interview with Jimi Hendrix).
