“In what concerns my association with men, with things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty.”
- Cicero
Thinking about the seventies again. They always get a bad rap these days – spun as a dark time of crime and chaos (there is of course a political element that gains power by our thinking of this creative time in a negative light) when actually there was a lot of joy – we were going to overcome the problems of the world with our increasing intelligence, humanity, and technology. Then came the conservative backlash… But that’s another sad story.
I used to perform occasionally with a drag king troupe. When I do drag I do it to celebrate maleness. My own male aspect, and the beauty of men. “All Right Now” is, in my mind, a perfect expression of the liberation of the seventies – a skinny English boy strutting out his sexuality in front of one of the thickest, baddest guitar riffs of all time. For the act I dress like a blue-collar guy in a ridiculously overstuffed toolbelt, an a-shirt, Levis and Dickies work boots. I bust open a 12 pack of Budweiser and invite my friends over to party, which snowballs into a swaggering air-guitar festival.
When I first presented this idea to the rest of the drag troupe, some people wanted to add another element: some femme women would walk by with placards replying in sassy ways to the protagonist’s sexually confident come-on statements (“In your dreams,” “Yeah, right,” etc.) The troupe had a very strong poststructuralist, gender-critical feminist element in it, which I supported, of course. This was my first show with the troupe and I went along with the placard idea, but it really detracted from the point I wanted to make.
We’ve all heard the phrase “whenever anyone is oppressed, we are all oppressed.” I would like to add, “Whenever any one of us is liberated, we are all liberated.” The confident white boy in “All Right Now” reflecting on his (probably imagined) successful sexual exploit is just one voice in a whole freedom movement. One of the loudest, of course, because he is one of the dominant group: white men – the ones who got the recording contracts and all the other advantages. But to the degree he is truly singing from a state of freedom, he is the voice of all freedom.
I know the sexual liberation movement became an excuse for many men to push themselves on women with renewed brashness. I definitely had my share of men on dates responding to my rejections with “you just need to relax, baby – you’re too uptight,” and succumbing to them because I believed it – that there was something wrong with me. I have been through my anger over these violations many times. It really sucked that they did that. It sucks that they still do it with different excuses, or even worse, with chemicals.
But Love and fear are always interlaced – we haven’t managed to separate them yet.
Maybe just a listen to the song would clear this up better than all my words. Listen to the joy in Paul Rodgers’s voice, the delicious power chords barking out of those humbuckers, the sassy cheap-ass bass tone. The claves! A great moment in recording history that was, whenever someone in that studio said, “How about some claves?” Or maybe they used them from the start to hold down the tempo. Whatever the story is around the claves, the song wouldn’t be right without them.
In the liner notes of the “Best of Free” Jim Bickhart tells the story of how “All Right Now” came out of a riff that guitarist Paul Kossoff came up with “fooling around backstage.” The song came out of fooling around, some boys playing around together. Free. Free to play, free to strut, free to make big fat sounds in the night on a stage in front of thousands of other people feeling a little bit freer by the time they went home. Free.
This is what my drag piece was about. A blue-collar white boy celebrating his simple, sexy self. Knowingly or unknowingly toward the liberation of all of us, and inspired by the overall feeling of hope and freedom of the early seventies, riding the wave of the liberation movement of the women, the queers, the people of color, and inviting everyone along for the ride.
I just went online to look for pictures of Free, and ran across Andy Fraser the bass player’s website. I looked at his photo page and thought, “god, what a beautiful man!” Then I read his bio, and found out he’s just recently come out of the closet and is living with AIDS. And there’s this sublime video about his coming out to his family. Then I surfed on to concert clips of Free on YouTube, including the recent Paul Rogers and Queen tour. Paul Rogers is still a total babe, too! Wow! Sexy men. And knowing it.
Words create reality. Naming your band Free puts a certain responsibility on your shoulders; that word carries powerful medicine. The guitar player overdosed. The band split up. But the survivors are so beautiful it makes me want to go work out. Free. Free. Free. Can we be? Can we support someone to be free even when their expression includes the language or trappings of the old regime? Can we bring the old boys into the new world? I guess it’s a situational decision, how far to stretch or how firm to stand. That old democracy thing again.
When I allowed the placards in the drag piece, I sold out in the same way I did when I let the date guys convince me that my lack of attraction was my own personal flaw. I thought there was some feminist message I was just not sophisticated enough to think to include; I needed to literally include the “woman’s voice.” But in retrospect, I realize that the message of freedom is enough. It’s the height of sophistication, and feminism. It’s the voice of all of us, beyond gender – or far beneath it, at the core of who we are. It can only be found in joy, acceptance… Love, in other words. Not tearing someone down, but lifting them up. It’s really not that difficult to do, it’s just hard to see you’re tearing someone down sometimes. That’s what we’re here to learn. And we get to do it over and over until we get it right.
