The Tooth of Crime: Sam Shepard's Way With Music

The Tooth ofCrime: Sam Shepard's Way With Music BRUCE W. POWE In the electronic age we are living entirely by music. Marshall McLuhan I sing the body electric. Walt Whitman In her poem about Sam Shepard, "Sam Shepard 9 Random Years [7+ 2]," rock star Patti Smith describes that playwright's use of music, and particularly rock 'n' roll, as an evocation of immediacy and energy, as an expression of the disruptive rhythms of the present, and as a kind of force that can affect both the audience and perhaps even the way certain characters speak: the poetry of Speed: And: the fast moving car the engine the black mustang pony the electric guitar. Cut with a new demon ... rock n' roll. With an amplifier for a heart he slid into Detroit. The motor city: cars and radios. His father was a Dixieland drummer The roots ofhis theatre was'music too. And, lastly: His theatre encompassed all those rhythm trade~offs all those special dialogues of the heart.I 14 BRUCE W. POWE uSpeed" is, of course, motion, tempo, hence arhythm, and an addictive drug, which is a mixture of cocaine and morphine. "The poetry of Speed ... " is a statement that could reflect our own frenetic times, something, as Patti Smith goes on to outline, plugged into current inventions and realities: "the fast moving car ..." and "the electric guitar." Speed addicts shoot up; electric guitars plug in; the car is turned on; and everything moves to the beat ofchange. This is an image of the accelerando of affluent American society, a suggestive illumination of a rhythmic principle inherent in Shepard's use of rock 'n' roll and especially in The Tooth of Crime, of language, and finally a remark concerning the energy, the drive, as it were, of some of Shepard's plays themselves . And as Patti Smith - the first female "punk" star - says, "The roots ..." (the source and the tonic?) of Shepard's theatre are in music - that is, in the sound, rhythm, and electric texture of rock 'n' roll. To which one can add the following: Shepard's Suicide in B', one of his most recent works, is an intriguing parable on the mysterious effects of music on performers, on audiences (from the Latin audire, "to hear," derivative words being "audibly," "audit"), on aural reception, on tuning in on what strange forces compel people "now." Two detectives investigate the possible murder or suicide of a renowned musician. In the process of their attempt to reconstruct the crime, they encounter sinister unseen powers, voices, echoes, and allusions - an enigmatic soundscape of innuendo, rumoUT. stories, and the possibility of the supernatural (where spectres are heard): LOUIS stands suddenly, listening intentlyfor a noise. No sound. LOUIS What was that? PABLO What was what? LOUIS That. They both listen/ora second. Again nothing. PABLO Not only are you adead weight but you're alunatic. LOUIS No, listen! PABLO I'm not going to listen! I'm through listening. LOUIS Like awoman screaming. Aterrible screaming. Like awoman being tortured. PABLO It's your ears, Louis! Your ears are telling you stories!2 This is another aspect of what I intend to call Shepard's "tuning in"; he uses music not only for its instantaneous and affective qualities, and to invoke in his work an aura of energy ("the poetry of Speed ... "), but also to structure and evoke the actual speech patterns of particular types of characters involved in special situations. In performance, rock music is an immediate invisible power that "ravishes" its listeners in a circumambient onslaught of sounds and rhythms and melody and suggestiveness; but, as we shall find, particularly in Sam Shepard's Way with Music 15 The Tooth ofCrime, Shepard often employs language as a musical instrument too, the heavily cadenced words surging as sound, to "tell stories to the ears," to act as intense oral communication. Shepard's ear for the "motion of words," as Ezra Pound called the use ofpure sound in language, is frequently manipulated for great effect. These are among the major elements of some of Shepard's most interesting plays. He is, I believe, a writer conscious of - or, perhaps, more accurately, thoroughly imbued...