NOTE: This is a read-only copy of something I’m expanding/revising. It was originally presented at the 2006 Experience Music Project pop conference on April 30, 2006 as part of a panel entitled “Critical Embarrassment.” The moderator was Greil Marcus. Fellow panelists were Matt Brennan, J.D. Considine, and Tim Quirk. A high-tech PowerPoint presentation, created by Paul B. Davis of the Beige Programming Ensemble (http://www.post-data.org/beige/) and Emma Davidson, a.k.a. lektrogirl (http://www.lektrogirl.com/), accompanied the paper. I’ll be posting the whole thing online once I figure out how to (any tips are welcome). The paper below is a mere shadow without the accompanying Powerpoint.

If you want to cite, let me know. Oh, and don’t forget to bookmark or link www.glorygloryglory.com. Email: Roberts at glorygloryglory dot com.

“Dave Marsh-Ing My Mellow: The Rolling Stone Record Guide and the Creation Of The Canon”

By Randall Roberts

“Will 1977 be remembered as the year of cracker disco? Probably not.” -- John Swenson on the Addrisi Brothers.

The opus that is The Rolling Stone Record Guide begins on page one in a place called Cream City, where the artist Aalon has created a “conceptual” discotheque. Aalon, we are told by narrator John Swenson, has imagined a “futurist urban landscape where Steven Baine’s Electric Train plays every Saturday night at the Jungle Desire, the earth’s hottest disco.” But Cream City, says Swenson, “doesn’t sustain interest,” so the Guide travels to Abba’s Sweden. Once there, we are told by critic Ken Tucker that the “mesmerizing synthesizers and permanently anxious lead singing of the women [are] pleasant and forgettable.”

Abba thus tossed aside, the Guide, published in 1979 and revised in 1984, jumps to blue-collar Australia, where nascent metalheads are learning to bang along with AC/DC. Their main purpose, explains reviewer and God-of-the-Moment Billy Altman, “apparently is to offend anyone within sight or earshot. They succeed on both counts.”

Along it goes, jumping from country to country, band to band, and by page 375 the alphabetical roll call has delivered us to Illinois, where Styx has just released Pieces of Eight. The Rolling Stone Record Guide makes a prediction on the group’s future: “… further progress seems unlikely,” writes reviewer Alan Niester, unable to perceive in his crystal ball the Great Leap Forward that was “Mr. Roboto.”

Peruse the Guide and on page 230 you’re treated to the story of Frank Marino of Mahogany Rush, a Canadian, who claims to have been visited while comatose by the ghost of Jimi Hendrix. On page 134, we learn about Focus, “the first successful Dutch rock band.”

The Rolling Stone Record Guide was the first of its kind. In 2006, the bookshelf is crammed with such primers. Among many others, The Trouser Press Record Guide documented punk and new wave; Robert Christgau’s Rock Albums of the ‘70s browbeat the reader with his rundown of the decade; the Spin Alternative Record Guide set the standard for a post-Nirvana public.

Today, of course, the Internet offers a mountain of data and opinions on any recording. iTunes invites instant feedback. Allmusic.com provides insight. Pitchfork uses the same scale, give or take a decimal point, as wine expert Robert Parker. But when it came out, the Rolling Stone Record Guide was The One, the canon. In his introduction to the first edition, Guide co-editor Dave Marsh explained that he, Swenson and his team strove to address “the worth that transcends cost.” Continued Marsh, “If you want to own one record by the Beach Boys or the Rolling Stones, the Guide will tell you which to buy – and which to avoid.”

I lapped up the data, processed it, and purchased accordingly. At school, I learned about Dred Scott. At home, I learned about Natty Dred and Bon Scott.

Matthew Friedberger of the Fiery Furnaces offered his recollections of the Guide during a recent conversation: “I bought [Public Image Ltd.’s] Metal Box and Gang of Four's Entertainment! because it said that those records were 5 stars. But there are some things that don't make any sense. Like, Dave Marsh hates Queen. When I was younger I wasn’t a Queen fan, but it’s unfortunately arbitrary -- to not see the hard work and intelligence, even if you think it’s misguided. There was a canon. The Band were good. Queen was no good. Black Sabbath? Not good. Then you get older and you say, no, Black Sabbath was good, and the Band only made one-and-a-half really good records.”

As we arrive at this historic 27th anniversary of the first book’s publication, perhaps its time to revisit The Rolling Stone Record Guide. We’re all grown up now, and some of us have reached different conclusions. I could describe these differences in great detail. I could nitpick. I could quibble with Dave Marsh’s bullshit dismissal of X as “directionless and abrasively unemotional.” I could giggle knowingly at now-New York Times film critic Stephen Holden’s fond affection for the Doobie Brothers. I could guffaw at the naiveté of judging the Vapors to be three times greater than Devo.

But I’m more interested in looking at the raw data. And there is a lot of it.

At its most basic level is Rolling Stone’s legendary star system, which grades the quality of each release with a number:

***** Indispensable: a record that must be included in any comprehensive collection.

**** Excellent: a record of substantial merit, though flawed in some essential way.

*** Good: a record of average worth, but one that might possess considerable appeal for fans of a particular style.

** Mediocre: records that are artistically insubstantial, though not truly wretched.

* Poor: records in which even technical competence is at question, or which are remarkably ill-conceived.

(bullet): records that need never (or should never) have been created. Reserved for the most bathetic bathwater.

When I was a budding teen, I used to sit at my desk with a calculator and crunch these numbers. Curious about how the Who stacked up versus the Kinks, I simply averaged the guide’s appraisals of the bands’ individual records. In 1979, the Who had twelve albums in print, a mish-mash of masterpieces (My Generation) and duds (Magic Bus). I added up the stars and then divided by the number of releases. The result: the Who’s combined output was worth 4.1 stars. The Kinks’ averaged a mere 3.7 stars. Therefore, the Who were .4 stars better than the Kinks. (I now know this to be crazy talk.)

I so believed in the gospel of the guide that the gray area of subjectivity was never an issue. It didn’t cross my mind that of the 52 reviewers who appraised the records, only three were women, nor did I question how many black critics chimed in. Rolling Stone, after all, was Rolling Stone. If they gave a record 1 star, that record was worthless. The Jimmy Castor Bunch was worthless.

The debut edition reviewed nearly 10,000 albums. The result is a 1979 snapshot of a musical moment, each release a pixel of data. The blue Guide was released five years later, after punk had spawned a thousand bands, disco had peaked, rap was rising and MTV was beginning to blossom.

The dust has settled. Time has conferred a sort of consensus on the recordings. So I decided to return to my calculator. Using new, updated technology -- an Excel spreadsheet -- I entered the contents of the 1983 revised -- blue -- record guide. Because, in hindsight, American popular music was at a more defined crossroads in the early ‘80s -- and because of the two, the second was nearer to my heart -- I decided to use as my data source this second volume.

If the Rolling Stone Record Guide was a blueprint, why not enter its contents into a database and examine its determinations as a whole?

In addition to averaging their output using my teenage methods, I augmented every entry with a more detailed picture of each artist: Nationality; if American, which region of America; genre; subgenre; race (of majority of band members); gender of lead singer; highest ranked album; average combined rank of all of their albums; record label; number of records reviewed; and reviewer.

For example, Blondie was a white punk band from America, New York City, with a female lead singer. They recorded for Chrysalis Records, their highest ranked album received four stars. Combined, their releases garnered 3 stars. Wayne King was the reviewer. Jermaine Jackson is a black male singer from the Midwest America who made R&B music for Motown Records. Kraftwerk is a white German electronic band who released records on Capitol and Warner Brothers.

After deputizing myself an authority on subgenre distinctions, I entered all the rock, R&B, soul, disco, punk, post-punk, southern rock, funk, singer/songwriter, international, reggae, ska and pop music. Time constraints, and sanity, prevented me from entering everything. As a concession, I ignored all of the country and western music, and as a balance, all of the traditional blues records. When I was finished, I had entered 1,768 artists.

What follows is an analysis of this data. What made for Greatness, according to the Empire of Rolling Stone in 1984. By understanding the unconscious biases of the editors, we can more fully understand what exactly we were taught, and how some of our pleasures came with the added baggage of shame.

**

Dave Marsh on Lydia Lunch: This punk funk screech is just so much avant garde horseshit.

The 1,768 artists surveyed from the blue Rolling Stone Record Guide put out 8,513 albums. The survey comprised 225 women, 1,517 men and 23 male/female duos. These artists came from many countries, but, of course, the majority of them were American, as were their record labels. Seventy-two percent of the Record Guide’s entries were created by white people. Twenty-eight percent were made by black people. The remaining entries were from Hispanics (.6 percent), Asians (.2 percent), Native Americans (.2 percent), and albinos (Johnny and Edgar Winter, .01 percent).

Overall, their combined artistic merit was assessed by the Guide’s writers to be worthy of 2.518 stars. In other words, according to the Rolling Stone star system, the collected, complete American record collection circa 1983 ranked somewhere between “artistically insubstantial” and “of average worth.”

Lines can be broken down any number of ways. How did English-speaking bands line up against one other? Rolling Stone has an answer: “At their best, Chilliwack was the finest Canadian rock band, outrocking BTO and outwriting Burton Cummings.” Combined total of all Canadian music, including Neil Young (who averaged a clean 3 stars for his 17 releases): 2.12 stars.

America’s Otis Redding, Woody Guthrie and the Velvet Underground were the heavy hitters stateside, and helped earn the home team 2.485 stars for the combined 1,142 offerings.

**

Before we dive into a few more probing analyses of the data, one factoid will answer a lot of questions about Rolling Stone in 1983, will address the very core of the western rock & roll subconscious: Specifically, the Beatles or the Stones?

When the guide was published, John Lennon was two years dead and Paul McCartney had just released Tug of War – “a tremendous effort,” declared Swenson. By mid ‘82, the Beatles corporation had released 28 albums -- including repackages and concert recordings. Fifteen of them received 5 stars. They have highest perfection-to-release ratio -- 53 percent -- of any artist in the book.

The Stones had released 31 albums and were riding reasonably high on the tails of Tattoo You, which Marsh characterized as a return to form (3 stars) after the “disappointing” 3-star Some Girls and the “downright depressing” Emotional Rescue, which he gave 2 stars. Their 5-star ratio was a mere 19 percent.

According to the Record Guide, the Beatles garnered an average of 4.107 stars. Dave Marsh granted the Rolling Stones an average value of 3.322. The Beatles were .8 of a star better than the Stones.

**

Dave Marsh on the Slits: …for hardcore anglophilic ass kissers only.

The guide is awash in blues-based classic rock bands. Sixty-six percent of the entries are from white males. Then again, that was rock & roll.

So what about the women?

Seventeen women released 5-star records – five percent of the 378 total masterpieces in the canon. Jamaican women were artistically superior to all others. Their combined output generated an unprecedented 4.083 stars. Canadian ladies were headed by Joni Mitchell and included Martha and the Muffins, Suzy Q (“disco hackwork”), Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and Anne Murray, who had an “exciting, even dark, side to her.” Combined, Canuck chicks were given 2.568 stars.

Across the border, Joan Jett parlayed her “sassy stage manner and no-nonsense hard-rock chops into one of the hottest stage shows of the time.” Aretha Franklin was “the greatest female singer of her generation.” Dragging down the Yank chicks were the unlikely trio of “worthless” women: Cheryl Ladd, Lydia Lunch and the Shaggs (“stilted … unappealing … perverse,” said Swenson), followed closely by the Carpenters, Stella Parton (Dolly’s sister), and Cheryl Lynn. The tally: 2.451.

Marsh slams Cheryl Lynn in a brief review, but makes a successful prediction: “Because it is every white, middle-aged record executive’s dream to discover a hot looker with a hook, the 1979 success of this wretched pop vocalist perhaps portends a trend. But that doesn’t mean anyone ought to follow it.” The book had little patience for the burgeoning computer-generated, mass-produced pop. The editors seemed to have been dragged kicking and screaming into the 1980s.

Black women, including the Brides of Funkenstein, Bettye LaVette and the Marvelettes, averaged 2.7 stars. The white sisterhood contained 129 members. They were given a combined 2.25 stars.

**

David Fricke on German band Can: The true impact of their influence is just now being felt in the English post punk fallout of P.I.L.

By 1982, record labels had firmly latched on to new wave and post-punk, and Rolling Stone captured the movement in full flower. The result is a comprehensive picture of the era.

Punk was washing ashore from England, and the Yanks were lapping it up. British punk bands were preferred by the writers by nearly half of a star over the domestic stuff: 2.857 stars to 2.393 stars. Marsh spit venom at Devo. He despised them: “If there is anything frightening about Devo’s social vision, it’s that so many fans are willing to scoop up this kind of nonsense.”

The guide piles particular animus on bands that didn’t know how to play, as evidenced by their definition of a 1-star release as one “… in which even technical competence is at question.” Of the Raincoats, writes Rob Patterson: “Sure, this is interesting for the new spaces these inspired amateurs discover …. [but] it’s also interesting to hear a cat howl for the first time, but only the first time.”

On the whole, the writers deemed Canadian punk to be better than American punk. Surprisingly, Australian punk was determined to be the best of all, with an average well over three stars.

On the domestic front, Northwest bands were deemed the greatest, but then again only two were represented – D.B. Cooper and the Wipers. Twenty-two New York City bands generated an average 2.64 stars, beating out midwestern, southern and Texas bands. West coast punk was worst of all, with a paltry 2.236 stars.

But is that surprising? Marsh revealed his bias in a review of Tonio K: “These LPs rock pretty hard considering their LA origins.”

**

One chilling bit of data deserves further investigation. Marsh appraises the work of German proto-metal band Lucifer’s Friend, and ultimately deems them to be “classic European hackwork … Real bad stuff.” Did he realize exactly how bad? When I averaged his ranking of their six albums, a combination of 1-star and 0-star efforts, it calculated to be exactly .666.

In 1982, no one could have predicted that metal would overtake southern rock and arena rock for the hearts and minds of blue-collar America. In hindsight, however, we were on the proverbial highway to hell. America was drowning in generic rock; 23 percent of all the recordings listed in the Guide could be defined as white, male, blues-based homogeneity.

The collected rank of all non-British invasion, non-punk rock bands received 2.369 stars.

But the book was even less kind to heavy metal. Marsh called Judas Priest “grunting, flailing hard rock, as vulgar as its name.” Budgie, the Pink Fairies, Rose Tattoo: they all sucked. Combined ranking of all metal bands was 1.622 stars.

Marsh’s Hammer of Justice came down hard on Motorhead: “That this band has never caught on in America’s wheat belt heavy-metal heartland represents a mysterious lapse of bad judgment.” Whitesnake, in contrast, is given a combined 3.333 stars for its three records. Its music, writes Considine, “carries a certain amount of that Deep Purple punch… but uses more finesse to flatten the listener.”

Black Sabbath had eleven albums under their leotards by 1982 and had just released Mob Rules. Ken Tucker decried the band as “eternally foiled by their stupidity and intractability….Time has passed them by.” The result: each album received one measly star. White Witch, the “Mid-seventies answer to Black Sabbath,” bested Sabbath with a combined 1.5 stars.

**

Alan Neister on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn: Valuable as both a musical oddity and background music for watching tropical fish sleep. The other albums repeat the latter’s musical themes with varying motifs, and are hence unnecessary.

The Guide revealed something about its feelings on the direction of music while assessing late-period Blondie. Of “Rapture,” now considered a landmark moment in popular acceptance of hip hop, reviewer Wayne King is dismissive. “[N]ow totally a studio entity, the group had become the darlings of those who champion style over substance (proof positive: the “special remixes” on Best of, a necessity for keeping up with the latest trends).”

Marsh’s three-word review of Sugarhill Records artist Positive Force is telling, even if I’ve yet to decipher it: “Jive rap gab,” it reads. By 1982, the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Tom Tom Club, Fab Five Freddy, Kurtis Blow and Trouble Funk had released 12-inches, but the Guide ignored them. The number of hip hop releases reviewed in the book is three – if you count the Tom Tom Club.

**

When I first bought the guide, I read the damn thing cover to cover. It was the first rock book I ever got, and the narrative read like a kaleidoscope, like Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. Each paragraph, each entry, moved across time, hit the bigger narrative from a different angle. But as the information accumulated, I started to understand where I had been, and where I was headed.

The most prominent characters in the Guide were given the star treatment: Presley, Dylan, Springsteen, Beatles, etc. had grand, thousand-word mausoleums constructed in their honor. Others were swatted away like flies and flicked out the window: “Dan Fogelberg in Gino Vanelli’s clothing,” wrote Considine on an artist named Spinetta.

Some had recurring roles: I watched the Fleetwood Mac soap opera unfold via their many uneven solo albums. Freaky bands came and went in perfect cameos, such as Swenson’s single-sentence review of disco band Seventh Wonder: “Parapsychological disco band later turned into an R&B vocal group with steel guitars behind lead vocalist Marvin Patton.” Sounds hot, to say the least.

Twenty-three years later their music has vanished. I couldn’t even find a picture of them at Google images to include in the PowerPoint. In another world, a parapsychological disco band which morphs into a steel guitar R&B vocal band would be celebrated. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ll just have trust Swenson and Marsh that the average score of their three records -- 1 star = “remarkably ill-conceived” – is on the money. Or not.