“The psychoanalysts say that most of us who fear heights do so because when we’re up high, we have to struggle hard against a potent urge—it’s the death drive operating—to toss ourselves off and end it,” writes Mark Edmundson, UVA English professor and Freud scholar, in his new book The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll. In this memoir we meet Edmundson at the time in his life when making any decision whatsoever feels to have the finality of jumping from a bridge: in his first days out of college and on his own.
The young scholar first finds a job stacking amplifiers at an arena in New Jersey for some of rock and roll’s greats, bands like The Who, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead—all of this in the waning days of classic rock, when pop culture seemed to carry a whiff of counterculture. The days—we pick up in 1974—when America was run by criminals and self-medication took the exalted forms of casual drug use and casual sex. “Rock then,” he writes, “was just what the witch doctor ordered for the thing that plagued us all in the post-industrial consumer collective: boredom,” and its counterpoint, rage.
The crap job in the rock realm leads to a wide array of crap jobs: driving a cab, working the door at a bar, and eventually, teaching at a progressive boarding school in Vermont. As a man who came of age after On the Road was published, Edmundson naturally identifies his prolonged manic state as a quest for the ineffable it— surely the most destructive pronoun to hit literature since she. He’s in awe of anyone, as he puts it, who sucks the air out of the room. To follow Pelops, the big-nostriled Marxist? Or Senior Druggan, the well-appointed capitalist? To escape the city, where he works “strictly to pay for what I required in order to work?” Or to live a rural life, which Marx says “dulls one’s sense of alienation?”
Alas, the young scholar must look beneath each rock and commit to memory what he finds. The Kings of Rock and Roll is a testament to the many blessings of reading widely, watching closely and listening deeply. After all, even the good doctor Freud himself once worked a crap job, dissecting eels in a laboratory in a vain search for their sexual organs. (He would later use more subtle methods.) It does not lead to a place Blake would have called Beulah, but to the place where the form of one’s life overwhelms its content, just as form, he argues, can overwhelm content in rock and roll.
