I'M AS FOND OF U2 as the next guy. "Desire," "All I Want Is You," "With or Without You" -- those songs ached with the best of them. "One," I remember, was a particularly poignant song to break up with Deana Zenisky to; we too had been one, but not the same, hurting each other and doing it again. Then U2 got artsier, I got artsier, and neither of us got artsier in the same direction. I lost track for a while. But a few weeks ago I heard Johnny Cash covering "One" in my neighborhood bar, and found myself aching, for Deana, high school, and all the things that happened to all of us since then. The song stood up pretty well, I thought. That line about "playing Jesus to the lepers in your head" threatened to ruin it midway through, just as it always had, and then the simple, sweet chorus about hurting each other and carrying each other and loving each other kicked in, and even though Cash seemed to keep missing a chord somewhere, everything -- all of us, high school, and even Deana Zenisky, I hoped, wherever she might be -- began to seem all right.

But oh, what a world I stumbled across when I bought the new U2 and opened up its lyric sheet! A verdant garden of eternal refrains: There is "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of," which tells you where you are; "Walk On," which tells you where to go; and "Kite," which tells you what to fly once you get there. After all, as Bono sings in "Beautiful Day," "it's a beautiful day." Suffused, according to "Wild Honey," with "Honey/wild, wild, wild." Even Pink Floyd finds itself pulled out from under the dark side of musical moons ("All that you build/All that you break/All that you measure/All you create"), and plopped into the light of carpentry class. And me? If I had a hammer, my speakers would be toast.

It used to be that the momentum of tradition forced U2's lyrics through, giving them breadth and depth that transcended the simplicity of what Bono was actually saying (and which allowed kids to swoon to lyrics their poetry-loving parents found utterly idiotic). Today's lines stand naked, thin and exhausted on an unadorned stage. Is this entirely the band's fault? Perhaps. Bono has been devoting more energy to advising Kofi Annan on Third World debt than rehearsing with his mates, and if Third World debt is better off for it, the band certainly isn't. But it doesn't seem fair to say the new lyrics are bad because they're clichés -- the history of great rock lyrics is riddled with clichés, and U2's best lyrics were no more original than their worst. Instead, listening to the record made me me wonder why some clichés work, others fail, and certain, specific ones continually reappear, like a trace dye in the bloodstream of rock and roll. Thinking about it brought me back to one of rock's original clichés -- and with it, back to the origins of the music itself.

ON JULY 4, 1954, Scotty Moore and Bill Black called up a young Elvis Presley to go into Sun Studios with them and lay down some tracks. The call came more or less out of the blue; Elvis was a greasy nineteen year old, with no real hopes and no real prospects. Nor did he have an idea of what it was he wanted to get down on record. The trio tried out a series of numbers, by Billy Eckstine, the Ink Spots, Eddy Arnold, Hank Snow, and Jo Stafford, none of which fell into place. "It was all right," Scotty said later, "nothing out of the ordinary. I mean, the cat can sing...[but] he didn't really knock me out." The next day started off no better, with halfhearted stabs at Bing Crosby's "Harbor Lights" and Leon Payne's "I Love You Because." According to Peter Guralnick's sad and brilliant Presley biography, Last Train to Memphis, nothing clicked until everyone had just about given up. Scotty and Bill went out for a Coke, Sam Phillips was fiddling about in the control room, and Presley picked up his guitar and started strumming a song he'd learned in the Tupelo projects. "This song popped into my mind that I heard years ago," Elvis recalled, "and I started kidding around with it." "All of a sudden," Scotty recalled,

Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open -- I don't know, he was either editing some tape, or doing something -- and he stuck his head out and said "What are you doing?" And we said, "We don't know." "Well, back up," he said, "try to find a place to start, and do it again."

With such prosaic injunctions, stars (and, arguably, musics) are born. The tune was Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right," a rough shuffle of a song originally recorded in Chicago seven years earlier by a black trio -- bass, drums, and electric guitar backing up Crudup's citified Mississippi holler. Crudup was forty at the time, and the "Momma done told me" chorus comes at you filtered through hard years of not paying much attention to what anyone had to tell him, much less his mother.

Elvis, on the other hand, sings like a man who hung up the phone with his mom five minutes ago. Slight shifts in the lyric turn the women Crudup's mother warned him about years ago into a single, if singular, girl, and if Crudup sings "I'm leaving town baby" like a man who's left many towns before, Elvis sounds like a kid striking out for the first time. Crudup phrases his "all rights" nonchalantly -- "any way you do" really is all right with Crudup, who's probably planning on moving on anyway. Elvis sings his like a virgin -- his world will be all right because he can't imagine it being any other way. This tension -- an adolescent grasping at freedom with one hand while holding on to mom's apron strings with the other -- is what electrified Elvis listeners. It survives in the music to this day.

BOB DYLAN NEVER released a cover of "That's All Right," but he did record the song, back in November of 1962 (at the same session that produced "Don't Think Twice"). Had it been issued as planned, it would have marked his first turn in front of an amplifier -- two-and-a-half years before his infamous "plugged-in" appearance at Newport. But in 1965 Dylan came out with Bringing It All Back Home, and with it, a striking variation on the Crudup-standard-turned-rock classic.

Like the Stones' "Satisfaction" before it, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" was, among other things, a perfect wedding of generational dissatisfaction and consumer disgust. Flesh-colored Christs glowed in the darks of this masterpiece, vying with lying advertisements and old ladies pushing fake moralities; if Dylan's "thought-dreams" could be seen, he sang, he'd end up on the guillotine. Dancing around the beat, Dylan lets his catalog of indignities fall between the strums of an acoustic guitar, and only those four syllables -- "It's-all-right-ma" -- land squarely on the downstrokes.

If Elvis's mother saw things clearly, Dylan's is trapped on the wrong side of the glass. We picture her passive, watching him go forth into a world whose cruelties she can barely comprehend, try as he might to explain them to her. Dylan's is the only comforting voice here -- "Don't fear if you hear/A foreign sound to your ear," he tells her -- and it isn't very comforting at all. His "alright" is the kind of comfort contained in a letter from the trenches: "It's alright, ma... I can make it." The son becomes the father, and the cliché finds itself pushed into territory that looks eerily lifelike, but nothing like home.