We want songs to be poetry, metaphors, and hyperbole. Recalling his 1993 interview, Winwood writes, singer Layne Staley “was the first obviously damaged person I’d ever met.” Staley and bassist Mike Starr would both subsequently die of overdose. Even if this is Hollywood malarkey, the deathbed drama of an unreliable narrator, then why didn’t anyone take Elvis seriously when he sang, plaintively, believably, night after night, “I’ll be so lonely, I could die”? But more: why did Parker and everyone around Elvis stoke his insecurities and fuel his drug dependence? Was it just the money, as the film suggests, or the control? Or was it the terms of the contract-what we have come to expect and demand of our rock stars?Īlice In Chains released Dirt in 1992, and the album’s songs were a litany of heroin addiction and death: “Rain When I Die”, “Sickman”, Junkhead”, “Godsmack,” “Down in a Hole”.
He instead suggests that Elvis died for his fans, from his need for their attention, their adoration, their love. In Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis (2022), Presley’s longtime manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), rejects the idea that Elvis (Austin Butler), at the age of 42, died of a drug overdose or drug-induced heart attack. If this rate of, say, elementary school teachers, or product managers, instead of musicians, died by suicide and substance abuse, how long would it take to become a national emergency? But then again, as DeLillo and Winwood understand, this is how we want our rock stars. For every David Bowie, who died of liver cancer in 2016 at 69-too soon but not tragic-there is a Naomi Judd, a Chris Cornell, an Elliott Smith, a Chester Bennington, a Keith Emerson, a Kurt Cobain, all of whom, and many more, died by suicide.įor every Chuck Berry, who died at 90, there is a Jim Morrison, a Jimi Hendrix, a Janis Joplin, a Billy Holiday, a Whitney Houston, a Prince, all of whom died of drug-related or -suspected early deaths. “Try Not to Breathe”.īy the same token, a list of rock stars who died unnatural, premature deaths is simply a list of rock stars. From the Who: “I hope I die before I get old.” From Metallica: “I have lost the will to live.” From Nirvana: “I Hate Myself and Want to Die,” although, in fairness, this song title’s words are never uttered. One begins to realize that a list of rock lyrics about death is simply a list of rock lyrics. The power of Winwood’s Bodies, then, is that it forces us to rethink seemingly self-evident assumptions about rock stars’ lives and deaths. A perfect monster, it is both the chicken and the egg. Like a magnet, the music business attracts people hardwired for self-destruction as well as this, it provides an unsafe environment for those who might not otherwise give it a go. I’ve transcribed with words of performers who have since taken their own lives. Over the course of my career I’ve spoken with many scores of musicians whose behavior might reasonably be described as deranged… I’ve written about people who, like me, have seen the insides of psychiatric care facilities. In Bodies: Life and Death in Music, a memoir and, by turns manifesto, veteran music journalist Ian Winwood implores fans and readers to take these questions seriously.
How satirically or seriously should we take this passage? If satirically, who is it satirizing? If seriously, can it be that audiences see rock star excess, leading to horrible, unnecessary death, as a cultural contract? Or worse, that we want it that way?
The terms of the contract: an anodyne, clinical phrase that DeLillo turns malignant. He bought off the skeptics by dying early, horribly, unnecessarily.
Joplin movie theater series#
Siskind, attempting to stake out an academic niche in Don DeLillo’s black comic 1985 novel White Noise, “fulfilled the terms of the contract.” “Excess, deterioration, self-destructiveness, grotesque behavior, a physical bloating and a series of insults to the brain, self-delivered.
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