This is the final presented version of "Exile in America" a paper which I presented at the Midwest Pop Culture Association Convention in St. Louis over this last weekend. It's OK, but hopefully something more will stem from it.

Always collaborating to achieve their goals, the need and eventual act of moving on alone has marked not only the most successful of American rock ‘n roll stars, but the most lasting. It’s this great desire to “head on out” that tells us the history of rock ‘n roll.

Legends aplenty have sprung up around this need to strike out on one’s own (Dylan’s electrified Newport Folk Fest, Springsteen jumping the fence at Graceland), but the records tell the stories. Whether it’s a personnel change, or just a change in lyrical content, the striking evidence of a need to create something new and lay down a new foundation with each record is apparent in the best of our American performers. With each Dylan record, there was something I n every groove that not only betrayed his last set of truths, but broke new ground for all of rock ‘n roll. Later on, in the seventies, Bruce Springsteen would show us that he could take everything we knew (or thought we knew) about rock ‘n roll and put it on one five-minute explosion of melting vinyl. In the nineties, when it seemed that grunge was going to be just another disappointing fad, Wilco came storming out of that wreckage to paint a completely new future with the words and melodies of it’s leader, Jeff Tweedy.

Americans need a maverick, someone to show us the way without knowing it. We want to be surprised, but only in a certain way. The performers that mark our Rock and Roll History are generally single figures, though backed by a solid cast of characters. Elvis, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Little Richard (Who would kill me if he found out he wasn’t first), Jerry Lee Lewis, Tom Petty, The Coug, Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan are all a part of that great tradition. It’s definitely not pointed out frequently that most of America’s great performers of all genres are also of a single nature, that they operate solo, but it’s an interesting fact that goes unnoticed far too often. The most lasting of our great American musical canon is made up of those incredible loners, Sinatra, Martin, Gershwin, Bernstein, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Duke, Miles, Dizzy, Coltrane, Bird, among many others, though the need to be alone seems to really come to a head with rock music. Why does it stand out? Not because it’s loud, or brash, but because it describes the innermost hopes and dreams (and nightmares), but no matter how much it describes our sad and lonely condition, Rock gives us the promise of a better one. While there can be a lot of talk about adolescence and “nothing to do” when one theorizes the inception of the form, the evidence betrays that theory. Rock has not only outlasted the teen years of those first few rock ‘n roll fans, but has gone on to define the formidable years many young people that came after.

But why Rock and Roll, why not any of the other genres? Rock is certainly the most bastardized of the American musics, taking on just about any form that it wants to, but again, it is the form with the most promise. Although it does not deliver on the togetherness that Country, Soul, and even Jazz can, it speaks more toward the future than any other genre. Country at its best is a simple state of the union; Soul is a reassuring pat on the back, no matter how warming or confident; and Jazz is the Classical Music, the high art, the peak of creativity of America, offering nothing more than itself and the listener’s interpretation. Rock, on the other hand, is a declaration of independence, a kick in the ass, and offers everything, never pretending to be anything it’s not. Rock has lasted because it inspires the listener to make it last. While lonely, it’s a very interactive, very personal art form; to quote Pete Townsend, “All I need’s a mirror/and I’m a star.” Completely alone, yet totally involved.

While that declaration of independence is so important to rock music, the stuff that has lasted has had more of a revolutionary tone, as opposed to just a rebellious one. This is why rock is so lonely, and why its history has been carved out and laid down by single figures and not groups. All too often one finds themselves the prisoner of their own hopes or dreams, as the protagonist does in John Fogerty’s “Lodi,” (“I played my songs whil people sat there drunk”) or the son in Springsteen’s “Independence Day” (“I won’t let them do what I watched them do to you”). Yes, these are characters that seemed to have lost everything, but there is the hope and promise that something will come along to liberate them. The promise is never fulfilled at once, but more in the journey that follows.

It’s problematic to say who has taken that journey, and how that journey can be charted. Certainly, there are those performers that have hidden their own voices behind others, using their bandmates as a mirror through which we can see them. Tweedy has tweaked the line-up of Wilco several times during their ten-year career, using up collaborators until he’s ready for something new. In other cases, performers use their ever-changing personal perspectives to keep the listeners guessing, or at the very least, following them, leaving a legacy for the critics to sort out. Dylan has made his career by keeping us guessing. But most every American performer tries to sort themselves out in whatever way they see as possible, giving their listeners and fans alike a little bit of what they expect, a little of what they don’t, and a lot of themselves. The singular voices in American Rock music are always trying to discover themselves by looking to their listeners, and vice-versa. They are trying to be us and, beyond any pop-star fantasies, we are trying to be them. We identify with Dylan because although he puts words together in a way that we could only hope to someday understand, he does it on his own. Springsteen gives us the hope that we, too, will some day break out of the mold of our fathers and mothers and build something greater and more lasting. The thing that we like to do most is our own thing, and that could be anything. We want to stand out, and move against what everyone else is doing, but make it look like we don’t care. Jeff Tweedy gives us that chance with every new Wilco album, breaking the expectations of everyone, being the most successful when he isn’t even trying.

It’s one thing to say that a performer is trying to be us, or at the very least to relate to us, but it’s that search to give people what they want that makes American performers so unique (I think it also sets us up for a lot of failure later on, but who remembers The Grays?). We want be our own men and women, and as much as we identify with single figures, music is made at its best by groups. We do not have a history of practical socialism in our country, so we think we can do it by ourselves. We can’t.

The truth of the matter is that Americans want to, but simply cannot, stand completely alone. Certainly, the pulling apart makes for great music, but as is the case, single performers make strides on their own, and then find a group to follow the dream down. Dylan starts to hint at this with Bringing’ It All Back Home and follows through on Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. A recording like “It’s all over now, Baby Blue” aches for more instrumentation (although the recent Scorsese Documentary kind of proves this wrong), leading to tracks like “Desolation Row,” and even “I Want You.” Dylan’s true power comes from the fact that he roars every line as if he’s shouting through the din of a noisy bar, even in the most intimate of settings. Springsteen too, would follow this formula on his first record Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey certainly mimicking Dylan, but not realizing that that was the only way for an American to do it. Some of the most exciting records in the history of Rock music have this strange balance of sound empty, yet totally full-blown. Wilco’s 1996 sophomore release, Being There straddles the same fence. Songs that seem to come from one person yet don’t feel right without a full band.

The paradox is as was said before; the leaders must stay ahead, but not too far. They cannot stray from sight, but walk their own path. As Americans, we have always upheld the lonely and forgotten, because that is the very core of our being. We don’t have the great partnerships of old. We are Dylan, we are Springsteen, we are Jeff Tweedy. They are everything we want to be, they are exiled in America.

I’ve just finished my adventure at the MPCA in St Louis USA, and had quite the time There were a lot of fascinating idea exchanged, but unfortunately, I think that a lot of those theories are well-worn. Part of it is that I think that most of these small pop culture communities are so incestuous, and people tend to get fixated on the same-old same, trying to perfect their all-encompassing theories to accommodate anything that they might encounter. One of the more pointed and well researched papers was on Branson, Missouri, and how it’s both kind of crap-holes at once. The intensity of the presenter was pretty amazing. How she was able to tie in everything together into four groups. Anyway that’s not why I’m writing…

Presently, I have found myself on a train bound for Chicago, and it’s quite the American experience, the land unfolding, the passing homesteads and the sun setting over this former prairie is almost too much to take. Chesterfield, IL, I’ll look that up later…It’s started to get a tad chilly, but I can wait to put my jacket on for a while now.

I always wonder where and why people are traveling when I get the opportunity to travel alone. There’s a girl who was already on the train when I got on, tears in her eyes, with that distinctive, expectant grimace of a young kid who knows they have to leave, but wish there was a fantasy world where they didn’t have to, or even grow up. There’s a girl in front of me who is probably no more than 19, but takes herself real serious, like the calculus she’s got in front of her is the key to the safety of hers and everyone elses soul. I know that most of the folks in this car are headed to Chicago, but what does that really mean to them? Are any of them Northsiders such as myself, or will they travel to the bungalow belts spread out over the Northwest and South Sides? I suspect that most of these kids are headed back to drunken adventure, judging by the lack of life, or even fear, in their eyes. Some of us were not prepared to travel, finding only Doritos and stale hot dogs as a replacement to the meals we forgot to eat.

It’s so rare that I get to record my thoughts in this way, but after a delicious tuna sandwich, I feel more than able to do a decent recording job. I keep thinking that they should put the heat on in the cabin here, but who knows what the protocol is for such things. We passed through Carlinsville awhile back, and I suspect that the Red Hat Divas are waiting for us in good ole Springfield I-L! I can’t think that it will be too much trouble, but you never know, ‘cause them old broads be crafty.

Ah… Springfield, the last time I saw you, you were covered in snow, hardly worth looking at. Now I see you as you were meant, a beautiful, burned-out tribute to the middle America lost to the Wal-Marts and Mini-Malls. Is there such a thing as justice?