Photo by Eva Moolchan
Post-hardcore icon Ian Svenonius (who has played in the Washington, D.C.-based bands Nation of Ulysses, Make-Up and, currently, Chain & the Gang) landed some impressive interviews for his latest book, Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock‘n’Roll Group. He spoke to Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Kingsmen frontman Richard Berry, and Paul McCartney. They’re all dead, of course (except, perhaps, McCartney), so the author claims they all spoke to him from the beyond. Mary Wells communicated by twisting spaghetti into letters and words. Buddy Holly traces his comments in salt and pepper scattered on the floor.
Regardless of the method of otherworldly communication, they all revealed some kind of wisdom about rock'n'roll’s secret origins, its clandestine motives, and its unconsidered ideologies, with Svenonius acting as living-world amanuensis. “I did a lot of studying for the book,” he recalls in his characteristic deadpan. “I tried to interview living people who I thought would be of help, but I really got no satisfaction from these establishment characters that I talked to. Because of that, I had to resort to speaking to the dead, and I found they had less political motivation to spin things in any particular direction. And they had lost their fear of insulting the living, so I got a lot of really honest feedback from the ghosts.”
Like its author, Supernatural Strategies is part tongue-in-cheek, part deadly serious -- a satire of rock's consumerist origins but also a thoughful treatise on what it means to devote yourself to a collective. Over the course of the book, Svenonius offers guidance on choosing a label, naming your band, doing (or not doing) drugs, and even taking your band photo: “If the group is an actual creative aggregate and not just a random assembly based around a single ‘genius’ creator, it will be considered very important for everyone to be ‘in’ the photograph.” Drawing from the wisdom of rock'n'roll’s most famous ghosts, Svenonius’ advice ranges from hilarious to cryptic to surprisingly useful.
Pitchfork: To what extent did your own experiences in rock'n'roll groups inform Supernatural Strategies?
Ian Svenonius: I don’t know if they had anything to do with the book. I don’t really talk about those groups or anything. It was more just a response to the current situation, the modern context of rock'n'roll. The modern landscape is mugged with all these rock schools. There’s a film called School of Rock, and there are rock camps and rock schools-- so many tutorials for children. The book itself is a response to all this practical knowledge that the children are getting, which seems like something that could have enormous ramifications on the art form, or whatever it is. You know, rock'n'roll. I felt like it was time somebody countered all this practical knowledge with this ideological and impractical how-to guide. Because everybody is just learning how to play the right way, and it just threatens to make things really boring. The book is definitely a manual. There are many pointers and a lot of warnings, and there are other things to consider besides the formal aspects of playing. It just seems like a major aspect of the book is talking about the ideological implications of rock'n'roll groups. In fact, a lot of it is a revisionist history of rock'n'roll.
Pitchfork: So learning how to be in a rock'n'roll group is more about simply learning to play your instruments in time with each other.
IS: You’re right. I’ve never been to one of these rock camps, but I think that they do have a real focus on people learning in different ways. It’s very experiential. I feel that there’s a danger of rock'n'roll becoming even more of a bundle of misguided clichés, and that there’s this fear of not doing it right as people are steeped in expertise. It combines to make things a little bit dull.
Pitchfork: Tell me about the séances. Did you have any idea who you would be talking to?
IS: It was all these origin figures—the big fish, not so many cult figures. That led me to believe that the afterlife has a hierarchy, that’s there’s a pecking order or a speaking order. But eventually they were able to come together and present this book. The first part is the séance, and the second part is the compiled wisdom of this group, which they left unauthored. That’s why the second part of the book has a really different tone. That’s the how-to manual.
Pitchfork: You mentioned that Supernatural Strategies is a revisionist history. That really comes through in the séance section, especially the chapter about rock'n'roll’s origins in street gangs.
IS: The accepted history of rock'n'roll has a lot to do with cultural guilt -- stealing the culture of the underclass. And it’s always just cited as being a version of the blues, which is true to a certain extent, but the resulting organizational model, which is never discussed, is at least as significant as the musical model. The organizational model is actually a kind of commercial variant of the street gang, which makes a lot of sense in the U.S.A., where everything is monetized and everything has to have a price tag on it to be worthwhile. In this sense the street gang is morphing into a commercial entity, especially because the street gang in particular places has strong connections to organized crime. Oftentimes street gangs either became organized crime or were the junior adjuncts to criminal organizations.
It makes sense that early rock'n'roll was very much tied in with organized crime, the jukebox industry and music publishing in particular. That’s essentially organized crime. The parallels with street gangs are really glaring, and what I learned is that it’s not only the doo-wop groups and the ‘50s groups that came out of the street gang mode, but also people like Ace Frehley from KISS, Blackie Lawless, the Ducky Boys, and some of these later rock groups. And obviously a lot of hip-hop groups evolved out of street gangs that were really ubiquitous in the ‘70s. In the book we talked about the falling fortunes of the street gangs coincide with the rise of the rock'n'roll groups.
Pitchfork: They both seem organized around the idea of home turf, which brings on its own antagonisms and loyalties.
IS: There’s a book I read a long time ago called The Violent Gang by Lewis Yablonsky. It’s one of the ‘60s sociological texts, and he was interviewing these gang leaders who were maybe 15 years old and they’re talking about their territory and they’re talking about the wars they’re about to fight with the other gangs. All I could think was, "That’s rock'n'roll." Everybody in a rock'n'roll group has this sense of their own importance. No matter how insignificant the group is, they all have this kind of territorial sensibility. The parallels were really striking.
Pitchfork: In one chapter, you—or, more precisely, the Kingsmen’s Richard Berry—discuss rock'n'roll as a capitalist tool borne out of Cold War fears and aggressions. How does rock'n'roll redeem itself from that unsavory association?
IS: The rock'n'roll group has been used as a capitalist tool to see consumerism overseas—and it still is. At the same time, capitalism didn’t really create the expression, although it did spawn this group model. In another sense, rock'n'roll is this rediscovery of an ancient pre-verbal expression, and that’s why it ultimately has such a worldwide appeal: It’s not only easy to emulate, but it’s also something that has been repressed for centuries. So people can’t get enough of it, and it always feels new in the same way that people’s faces always feel new. It’s endlessly exciting. So I would say that just because a thing was used to counter these Soviet claims to moral superiority and high culture, it doesn’t mean that the whole thing is necessarily dismissible.
Pitchfork: In the book, you also argue that rock is anti-establishment but has been absorbed into the establishment.
IS: Those contradictions are what make rock'n'roll something that doesn’t feel tiresome, at least for me. It’s a riddle. And the different permutations are invested with the same paradox. Like punk rock. Is it conservative? Is it progressive? It’s hard to tell.
Pitchfork: Even though you take a big-picture view of rock'n'roll history, Supernatural Strategies seems like a very timely book, especially in its criticism of the digitization of music, the absence of tangible product, and the changing role of the critic online.
IS: Those chapters are really more topical than the book in general. Like I said, the book is haunted by these ghosts of rock giants who are still ubiquitous. So the book is very much of its time. It’s very much addressing the situation at hand, which is digitization and the role of the publicists and so on. But that’s all been going on since the ‘50s. Back when there was radio, there was also payola and publicists. These are ongoing concerns, and if rock'n'roll continues to be a thing that people are interested in, they will probably continue to be part of the environment. So I guess that it’s more about just addressing these things. As far as the physical manifestation of the group, that’s what I was talking about earlier: It’s difficult, I think, for a lot of rock'n'roll groups to expand on what their group is. The fact they don’t have these physical manifestations is reducing their ability to be what groups once were in people’s minds. The book addresses these things for the psyche of the ingénue who is starting his or her own group and wondering why it’s harder for them to have the narrative arc. A big part of creating this kind of narrative is the record covers.
Pitchfork: Are there any groups past or present that embody these supernatural strategies particularly well? Any group that’s perfectly formed?
IS: I leave it really vague in the book. We obviously go back to the Beatles and the Stones over and over again, because those are such paradigmatic group models but I really try to leave it open. I think that you could use the strategies in the book for making your pop group or your noise group or whatever it is. It’s applicable to whether you’re making your version of the Partridge Family or your version of Flux of Pink Indians. They’re universal. In the book, I don’t say that the group has to be political, but it does have an ideology. The group is an aesthetic ideal. In the book I talk about is the importance of the record cover and how the rock'n'roll group has been changed by the diminishing of the record cover. The record cover gave the rock'n'roll group its sense of self and the sense of importance. But that’s a good question. Are you talking about a modern group? Maybe Public Enemy. That’s a group that touches all the bases. It feels very conceptually concise. But I don’t know. There’s no one right way to do it, and I think maybe trying to find a perfect example might be outside of the book’s jurisdiction.
