Art Deserves To Be Preserved-- Lost Patti Smith Tape Surfaces... Make America Great Again

The Billboard Top 10 didn't look even vaguely familiar to me this week. "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus is #1. Post Malone has the #2 and #3 song, #3 with Swae Lee. Ariana Grande has the #4 slot with "7 Rings." Halsey's "Without Me" is #5. The Jonas Brothers was basically a commercial concoction of Disney's for little children in 2005 and are now grown adults with little children of their own-- and a big hit, "Sucker" (#6). "Dancing With A Stranger" by Sam Smith and Normani is #7; and... remember Halsey back at #5? She's featured by BTS on "Boy With Luv" at #8, new on the charts. Billie Eilish has a hit with "Bad Guy" and she's from my neighborhood and just made a big splash at Coachella so I heard her music before. And #10 is Cardi B and Bruno Mars ("Please Me") and both of their celebrity has crossed over from the music world into the greater cultural/news world, so I know who they are. I guess you could argue that they-- as well as Billie Eilish-- capture some of the spirit of rock'n'roll but the point I was trying to make was that there's no rock music on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Well, I thought, that was always more a pop chart than a rock chart anyway. So I found a rock chart and there were some real rock bands on it-- even big ones that sell out arenas, like Panic! At The Disco (with songs at #1 and #4) and Imagine Dragons (with songs at #3 and #5). Tame Impala has two songs in the Top 20 too. I guess there are fewer bands now so you can have more than one song in the charts the same week without that being that big a deal.

Fewer bands because kids don't write songs and learn how to play instruments? They just imagine being dis at Coachella making beats. OK. My friend Daisy-- who's still in the business in a way-- puts it like this-- "Rock is in an assisted living facility; it's not dead but it's not vibrant." Yeah, that's what I was thinking too: it's kind of moribund. It's not going to die, I don't think. But it's resting. On hiatus.

When it comes back I suspect it will come back the way it started-- the way it is on a small scale now-- mostly driven by expressive creative impulse. That's when it's bets anyway. Then guys figure out girls like it and they can get laid and more people start bands. OK, still OK. It's when people realize you can get rich and famous-- kind of a corollary to getting laid in a way, a sick way, really-- that it peaks and starts declining. That happens. I kind of think it'll happen again.

During the week, my old amigo, Andy Paley, e-mailed me that lost Patti Smith tape up top, from 1976, in Brussels. Andy's playing bass. I couldn't wait to hear the cover of Chubby Checker's "Let's Twist Again," which I don't remember having ever heard them do before. But it was at the end and I'm respectful enough and curious enough to to skip ahead. Thank God. The versions of "Gloria" and then "Land" (where she introduces Andy, probably why he sent it to me 'cause I always got such a kick out of the other time she introduced him in a song years later).

The interview parts are as good as the music parts. So listen to them hole thing and be happy you read DWT. God, she looks so young and sounds so young. She was wrong about something though; she forgot to mention jazz.

Speaking as an artist she mentioned that rock'n'roll is like, for me, the most integrated form of art because I can use my body, which is a great tool, I can use my mind, I can use my throat... all the elements that I use in separate art I'm able to use all at once in rock'n'roll... Being an American there's a lot to be ashamed of. There's lot to be proud of, but... Americans are middle class and very materialistic and all but we did do one good thing: we created rock'n'roll. It's to me the one thing that made America great... Rock'n'roll doesn't belong to America; it's belongs to the universe; it belongs to the world. Rock'n'roll is the first real American art. We did abstract expressionism. We had Jackson Pollock; Willem de Kooning but it was still a European energy. At last-- rock'n'roll; we did something. Finally we won our place in cultural history. Now it belongs to everyone."

The next segment... well go listen to it yourself. It's like a course you shouldn't miss. She says she doesn't think history "can deny Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison; they're not going to be able to wipe that out of peoples' memories... As long as I'm alive and as long as I'm working no one is going to be able to push rock'n'roll down into Hollywood or theater or make it, like, passé or make it like a fad or something. It's art... Art deserves to be preserved." Chubby Checker.