Nik Cohn displays the cult of Rock

Press, 21 October 1989, Page 28

Nik Cohn displays the cult of Rock

Ball the Wall. By Nik Cohn. Picador, 1989. 398 pp. $18.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Nevin Topp) Nik Cohn does not rate in “The New Journalism,” a 1975 anthology edited by Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, but he should have. Between 1965 and 1975 Cohn wrote some marvellous pieces on rock music and the fashion that surrounded it. “Ball The Wail” gives us a chance to savour not only his writing, but also a golden age in contemporary' music, from Bill Haley through to the decline of pop, which Cohn records with a cynicism that is as sharp as a surgeon’s scalpel "Ball The Wall” is an anthology of his early work. Part fact, part fiction, it has some of the qualities that Hunter S. Thompson has put into his better work. What makes the writing good is that this author, who as a 17-year-old upstart began writing about rock in 1965 with a second-hand typewriter, takes the music to its basis. Highly opiniated, he sees Presley as The King, and The Rolling Stones are not far behind. About The Stones’ behaviour, he writes that each pop generation must go one better than the one before, as it if was being done for the first time. What clearly comes through is a wave theory, and Cohn follows it through rock and fashion. For example, when the San Francisco hippies became hip, then the movement died and became the Pepsi

Generation, paying lip service to love, peace, and sharing. Similarly, his analysis of the English teddy boys, beginning as an underground movement with a, few fanatical followers, but becoming a national explosion when they emerged — a blueprint for all future teenage cults. Cohn can be particularly cutting and funny. His description of the filming of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” near Jerusalem, with the whole crew being caught up in the messianic movement, is comic. He is a dedicated hack. After getting dozens of definitions about what makes a gentleman, he finally tracks down the mysterious Baron Lambert, who had been setting the latest trend in London. Cohn admits to being nervous, but finally cannot help himself. He asks the baron to define a gentleman. The baron replies: “A gentleman is someone who does not talk to magazines about gentlemen.” Followers of Jean-Paul Sartre might have difficulty in accepting awopbopaloobop alopbamboom from Little Richard’s song, “Tutti Frutti,” as an acceptable theory for living, but Cohn does. The book also includes some of his American writing after his move to New York in 1975, including “Another Saturday Night,” which Robert Stigwood turned into the film “Saturday Night Fever.” Cohn is now working on three new books, but “Ball The Wall” gives plenty of satisfaction in the meantime.