Here’s a thing that happened one day at SPIN back in the ’90s: we all went to the airport. I don’t remember how we got there, or if we arrived together, I don’t remember much at all except that we met at the airport. Huddled together outside one of the terminals at LaGuardia. By “we” I mean the editorial staff. The disgruntled/disheveled writers and editors. And of course our Publisher and Editor Bob Guccione, Jr. He was looking particularly pleased with himself that day. I think because he enjoyed torturing us and he knew that we were at the very least (speaking for myself, you understand) hungover and upset at having to be awake and at a place before noon. And that we didn’t like surprises. And he was about to surprise us.
He had in his hands a bunch of envelopes. In the envelopes were plane tickets. I don’t remember how things worked, exactly, in the pre-9/11 days, but I do think you had to buy tickets in peoples’ names beforehand, meaning that Bob knew where he was sending us, but we didn’t know where we were going. The idea was that we were going to search for the soul of rock and roll, however we cared to define it, at the destination printed on our ticket. I drew Tulsa. Which is in a place called Oklahoma that, having been, and in the intervening years been back several times, am still not entirely sure exists.
I went, I saw, I did not conquer. One brief example: I remember walking into a local rock club, which… I think was supposed to be closed? Or maybe I was too early? I never did figure it out. The door was open, the lights were on, but nobody was home. The place was empty. I did the only logical thing under the circumstances, which was to go behind the bar, make myself a drink, sit on a bar stool, drink the drink, consider making another but then realizing that I had rented a car. It was very much frowned upon at that time to operate a car while drunk — I haven’t owned a car since 1987, before which drunk driving was not just allowed but encouraged, I’m pretty sure.
I flew back to New York — we all flew back, but I didn’t keep a headcount and people used to come and go pretty regularly back then — and wrote about it for the August ’91 issue coverlined “In Search of the Soul of Rock ‘n’ Roll”. The story I wrote prompted an angry response in the local Tulsa newspaper about Big City sophisticates reinforcing hayseed stereotypes. I had not bothered to delve below the surface of Tulsa’s vibrant music scene, the paper concluded. The paper was entirely correct. How on earth was I supposed to delve below the surface of Tulsa’s vibrant music scene from my motel room? Plus — and this is just free advice that applies to everyone everywhere in any situation — you really should lock your doors at night if you have a substantial stock of high-end liquor on hand and I happen to be in town.
Obviously I did not find the soul of rock ‘n roll in Tulsa. Nobody else found the soul of rock ‘n roll wherever they went. That wasn’t really the point of the exercise, if I might be allowed to peer into Mr. Guccione’s mind for a moment. He had assembled a crew of very fine writers/alcoholics, and he knew that by sending us blind into unfamiliar terrain he would reap unexpected results that it would then be his pleasure to print in the magazine. That was the way things used to work. You took chances. You took risks. You did surprising things for the sake of doing them. And look, I get it, the world has changed so much in the last 40 years — has become so risk-averse — that maybe that way of running any kind of publication has no place in the culture anymore. It’s expensive, and it doesn’t always pay off. These days, costly failure is reserved for billionaires and criminals, who are often the same people.
Sad if true. But you hold in your hands evidence that it’s not entirely dead. SPIN endures. That attitude endures, though I can’t name specific examples because my head hurts from the memory of the hangover incurred in Tulsa. My larger point is this: the reason I didn’t find the soul of rock and roll in Tulsa, that none of us found it wherever we were sent, is that rock ‘n roll is a movement of the human spirit towards its essential nature and can only be found in people, not things. If you’re lucky, and life has not stomped the empathy and curiosity and hunger for transcendence out of you — and I don’t blame you if you it has, the world is a brutal fucking place — then the soul of rock ‘n roll might just be closer than you think.
See KOTV News On 6’s coverage of SPIN’s 2015 republication of Jim’s 1991 Tulsa quest.
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