Bill Wyman Interview

You know those super fun ranking stories that New York Magazine’s Vulture does? I interviewed Bill Wyman, who has penned of those bunch of music stories. In these epic pieces, which list every track from worst to best of some of the most important rock acts—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Clash and Led Zeppelin—Wyman justifies his rankings, while telling the band’s story. His most recent article of this kind, ranking the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, is more ambitious still, and becomes almost a history of the rock genre itself, and an argument for its cultural value. Theses stories are a mix of the high-minded, the fantastic, and the silly—in other words, smart and entertaining.

Here is an excerpt from the Q&A:

Chris Buck: One of the big things that crossed my mind in reading your Beatles rankings is that there’s almost a religious sanctity around certain songs that you kind of pull apart and criticize. I know you’re not necessarily doing that on purpose but at one point you said something about challenging the orthodoxy of rock criticism. The Beatles are so sanctified yet the first half of the ranking basically talks about why those songs failed. That’s huge. You take songs that are on some of their most important albums and giving them low ratings. Did it take a certain mental leap for you to do that?

Bill Wyman: It’s kind of funny because that’s the trouble with these lists, if you start with the best you get all the fun stuff and then you’ve got the end of it slogging through the bad stuff, so I like to do it from worst to best because you try to dismiss the worst stuff and then start telling the story of the band.

Of course, with The Beatles, The Clash, or Led Zeppelin you have these amazing, crazy stories. One of the reasons people get so mad at these articles is that they start reading and it’s, “This song is bad, this song is bad.” The Clash did maybe 50 great songs and Pink Floyd did like 17. So it’s very difficult.

One of the things I find disappointing in some of the pop criticism is there’s a thing called rhetoric. It’s the art of persuasion when you’re writing. That doesn’t mean debating, it just means all the tricks that you use to get people to read what you’re writing and, in theory, come around to your way of thinking. You can be very mundane, dry, and legal, or you can debate and have fun. What I try to do is I try to alternate between outrageousness and charming, and self-deprecation and pompousness… not pompousness but just saying things from on high but then a couple lines later being kind of humble, or saying, “I used to think this but I was wrong.”

I mean, I’d almost like to do another Beatles list the next day and have it be a different order just to make the point that this is ridiculous. The point of it isn’t the ordering.

Sometimes when people criticize me I say, “The numbers don’t lie,” and that gets people even madder, but I’m just trying to make it clear that this is completely preposterous. It’s an exercise in writing, and hopefully interesting writing. It’s just to say interesting things to think about it.

I don’t care if someone thinks that “Strawberry Fields” isn’t a good song. I would like to read a list of songs where “Strawberry Fields” is the second worst Beatles song. I’d like to hear a spirited defense.

That’s the one thing that I wish people would think about criticism and I think would make the world a better place when it comes to journalism too. We hopefully want smart, quality writers who don’t have hidden agendas. I don’t like trolling. I believe in clear expository writing. I believe in the intelligent and curious but disinterested reader. That means someone who’s smart and someone who’s open minded but also disinterested, meaning if I’m not interesting enough he or she will just move on. If you think that people are smart and they’re open minded and they want to read something interesting then that’s what I try to do. That’s the mixture that motivates those.

Back to your question—we’re all smart, we understand The Beatles aren’t perfect, and they did some bad songs. Let’s move on. Let’s go through them. You can disagree. You can think that “Get Back” is a better song than I do. That’s great, so let’s hear your argument. Again, I would love to read the next person’s ranking of them.

Picture courtesy Bill Wyman (rockin’ the bedroom in the seventies)