(I'm) Stranded

Back when the platters that mattered were platters

Stranded is a rather famous book among a very small subgroup of humanity. Mostly written in 1978, published in '79, and edited/curated by rock/cultural critic Greil Marcus, Stranded purported to ask 20 rock critics to name their so-called "desert island disc", i.e. what was the one album they would have to have if forbidden all others. Some, like M. Mark, chafed at the conceit of the question: he protested that he would not choose any single one of his beloved Van Morrison records, before grudgingly giving in and selecting the live double LP It's Too Late to Stop Now on the basis of sheer volume. Nick Tosches, whose scabrous essay opens the collection like a howitzer battery discharging in a rest home, treated the assignment as an excuse for a autobiographical exegesis intermittently featuring the Rolling Stones: "Next to me in the emergency ward was a boy who held a Maxwell House coffee can to his neck, to catch the blood that dribbled from a cut in his throat. In his lap was a cassette recorder playing the new Stones album, Exile on Main Street." (Tosches ended up settling on Sticky Fingers.) Jim Miller's choice, Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica, seemed to be an excuse to circumvent the album-centric nature of the project in favor of the good ol' fashion 45 rpm vinyl single, as well as an opportunity to rebut the myth that Ronnie Spector sprang fully-formed from the skull of Phil Spector. Dave Marsh creates a mix tape for masturbation, which, after all, "is the secret reality of rock sexuality - what all rock listeners have in common - which is probably why so many of us have Catholicism and Judaism in our backgrounds." Most, after the obligatory sarcastic preamble (best, by Paul Nelson: "Doing a piece with a desert island premise is like writing a suicide note and then sticking around to cry over it."), just answer the damn question.

The book arrived right at the punk/rock schism (the only schism, as Robert Christgau put it in his re-introduction to the 1996 edition, that was gonna be acknowledged by a bunch of entirely white, overwhelmingly male rock critics in '78) and, with the exception of a handful of pieces, reflects the pre-punk consensus. Marcus' original preface notes the conspicuous absence of any records by the Beatles, Elvis, Chuck Berry, or Bob Dylan, artists whose presence would be notable, perhaps even hailed as somewhat courageous, in today's obscurity-fetishizing climate. Venerable '70s dinosaurs like Jackson Browne, the Eagles, and Linda Ronstadt all merit inclusion, an outcome that would have been difficult to fathom had this book been compiled a mere year or two later. The Stones, still a going proposition in 1978, having just released the brilliantly profane Some Girls, scored 1968's Beggars Banquet and the aforementioned Sticky Fingers.

Still, a nascent critical shift is discernible. Tom Carson, the youngest contributor by "a good five years", according to Christgau, picked the Ramones' then-fresh, still-classic Rocket to Russia; the Dean himself chose an English import bundling the New York Dolls' two Mercury LPs, New York Dolls and In Too Much Too Soon; Langdon Winner elected that oldie-but-goodie, Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (still don't get it myself); and Ellen Willis picked a Velvet Underground comp. At just under of the quarter of the pieces present, a reader in '78 could be forgiven for dismissing these contributions as outliers from the steadily-plotted Rolling Stones-Van Morrison-Neil Young-Bruce Springsteen axis running through the book. A reader in 1980 might have been convinced that Carson, Christgau & Co. were especially prescient; a reader today might say they seem downright visionary - after all, who really was more Rock and Roll Future: Bruce Springsteen or Joey Ramone?

Regardless of your predilections taste-wise, much of Stranded's enduring genius lay in that good rock writing is good rock writing, regardless of what one thinks of the underlying subject matter. Grace Lichtenstein's deeply personal take on the Eagles' Desparado urges you to reevaluate a band that has long since passed into FM ubiquity. Simon Firth astutely diagnoses what's politically troubling about the Rolling Stones, which is that they've got no politics beyond "a contempt for the masses that they share with any respectable small shopkeeper." Tom Carson deftly describes the cynical, arty pretensions of seventies' corporate rock as "icing with the cake shot out from underneath it." So, yes, you can laugh at the notion of being trapped on a desert island for all eternity with Linda Ronstadt, but the type of emotional reaction that would occasion a thirty page disquisition on Living in the U.S.A., such as John Rockwell provides herein, is not so easily mocked. If anything, the latter-day unfashionableness and triviality of some of the records and artists represented in Stranded serves as a reminder of the ultimately ephemeral nature of critical taste. If the book came out in 1980, somebody probably would have listed The Clash's debut LP; if it came out in 2008, somebody might well have picked Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, which in '78 would have required you to flee to a desert island to escape it. If "[o]ne of the chief delights of rock 'n roll is that it's trash music," as Tom Carson has it, well, one man's trash is another man's treasure, after all. Every dog has its day, etc.