TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#88 – The Mercy Killing

#88 - The Mercy Killing

Let's stick a fork in it, shall we? Let's do a little dance where people clean out their closets of a hundred-million Beatles LPs and melt them into a huge, disgusting mountain of vinyl which we'll then use as a battering ram to knock Graceland to the ground. Let's light 'em up and then do a little happy dance as we hold a wake for everything that ever was rock n' roll.

Clean out the closets, clean out the garages. All your albums, all your 45's. All your 8-tracks, your dusty, scratched cassettes of the Best of Wham!. All of 'em - dig 'em out. Put them on a railroad side car that we'll transport to Yucca Mountain and then bury in a deep, dark hole with all the other toxic waste in this world. Make a new reality show called "Burn Yesteryear's Pop Stars at the Stake" and every week we'll hoist some warmed-over pop icon up onto a telephone pole and roast marshmallows over their flaming corpses. For sweeps week, we'll burn all 27 members of Menudo and save Ricky Martin for last. Arriba!

Rock is dead - let's just celebrate it. Let's mark the occasion and call some day that hasn't been made into an official day of consumerism in the Sunday paper - maybe in April. We'll call it the Day that Rock Died - Disco died but because people didn't officially recognize its passing it was allowed to remain dormant and later come back - kind of like the Herpes virus or your favorite cold sore.

So yes, let's kill it - let's light 'em up and burn it down. Kick the ashes to the curb and use it to create an artificial reef out in the Gulf of Mexico. Don't look at me like that! Ever seen the "media" section of a Goodwill store? Just imagine your favorite Brady Bunch cast album or Orleans LP as a new habitat for bluegills! It's brilliant, I tell you! People have been avoiding the truth for years and in the meantime, all these attempts to restart the heart of rock has just been a lot of wasted effort. Like some demented EMT who keeps doing CPR over a corpse going "Come on! Breathe!" It's over, man. Mark the time and call the next of kin - ROCK IS DEAD.

I'll stop before someone slaps me.

You've probably been reading the pundits punding about the eminent death of rock for quite some time now. It's been cooking in the back of my mind for a while and although rock has been stinking up the joint like a toilet that won't flush, it isn't really dead. Rock is music, music is art, art is life and even when you have kids doing the modern version of cavemen scratching on walls in three chords or less, that will never really die. So what's going on, then? What is wrong with rock?

Back before I knew what music was, before the Winamp playlist. Before I tried to start my own radio station. Before I did a year and change as a college DJ. Before all of that, I remember one wet summer vacation where we packed everything up and threw it in the back of the Dodge Aspen rustbucket we were using to get around at the time. Mom and dad flipped on the AM to listen to whatever made it down the coast. I heard a song and it riveted me - I had never heard anything like it before. It instantly became my favorite song and fortunately, it has a pretty high rotation on an oldies station.

It was pretty weird for a suburban white kid in the 80's to choose "Green Onions" by Booker T. and the MG's as his Favorite Song. As I picked up a paper route and started exploring musical taste by the cassette section of Tower Records, I didn't pick up the popular stuff that kids were listening to. Huey Lewis and the News, Paul Simon and R.E.M. Other kids were still listening to Foreigner while the girls were rocking out with NKOTB. Good for them - I still stand by my decision…making me the one person who still thinks about that stuff after all these years.

So - music. Music has been a fixture of my life since that rainy morning. Driving anywhere, I've always had some burned CD's available and when there isn't anything but the radio I'll play that hoping to find something worth listening to in between five minutes of commercials. This has been going on for years: when I was younger I'd need music going in the background to focus on my homework. Ever try to do algebra in the 2 minutes and 20 seconds of "Classical Gas" because that was one of the only 45s your dad owned that you could stand to listen to? Years later, I was helping him clean out the attic (finally) and we brought down stacks of old LPs. Barry Manilow, George Benson…Mongo Santamaria. MONGO SANTAMARIA??? The tension in the room was palpable.

Usually what you listen to later in life is influenced by what you heard growing up. Either to embrace it or to completely reject it…how and/or why mom and dad allowed the Smurfs Cast Album to be played in our house when I was 5 or 6 was completely beyond me. Maybe it was guilt for all the stuff that I fell on or that fell on me. Scored a slot-car set that time I popped my right temple open on a parking lot pole (4 stitches and a Dukes of Hazzard slot-car set…nice haul!).

Sorry, I'm drifting a bit. Growing up and being in the Datsun B210 that mom and dad owned before they purchased that rust-bucket Aspen - we heard a lot of music and all of it came out of K101 or KOIT-FM. So imagine you're between the ages of 4 and 7 and your parents are shuttling you around all the places you have to go. Imagine riding in the back seat where you and your siblings learn to amuse each other, fight, be bored…whatever. These were the days before DVD/LCD systems were in the back of your suburban-assault vehicle. Imagine that you're bored and you're driving north on Mission Boulevard outside Hayward in the days before there were any houses up there and you could see miles and miles of fields, greenhouses and one-story concrete tilt-up buildings. Imagine that you're doing this listening to the Beatles' "Something" or Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are". To this day, I really…*really* can't listen to "Something" and that silly guitar lick without a flash of a sunny day being bored in the back of mom and dad's dust/vinyl smelling B210.

I can't listen to that song anymore.

It does illustrate my point, that music was always something that was a part of my life - willingly or otherwise. I did ask Dad one time why it was that he didn't introduce us to Creedence Clearwater or Led Zeppelin. I don't remember the answer - I think the only thing I do remember is that it didn't answer my question. Something about not wanting us to look at it the way he looked at Grandpa's era of music (Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller…bluegrass). In the end, we discovered it and embraced it for what it was anyway. Other times Mom would flip on a classical station when we were driving around and that's how I started listening to classical music. Steve brought rock home from high school and that's how I started listening to hard rock and heavy metal. Other stuff like the Blues and Zydeco came from listening to KFOG (which I started listening to after KOME switched formats to Alt-rock and its inevitable death). Hip-hop and Jazz I just picked up from various places and times. I heard something I liked, I took the opportunity to pick up more and pretty soon I'm absorbing it into my library like the Borg.

Musical discovery really should be that simple. I like to keep away from the people who are the definitive 'philes' of that genre…especially jazz fans, they make me crazy. Maybe fan is the wrong word - maybe I just hate groupies. That's another topic.

Since music serves many purposes for me (soundtrack, distraction, background noise…etc.) it's not much of a surprise that I find different genres to be engaging but only in specific contexts. I believe that's what I was trying to say when I wrote this. What works in one situation (at the gym…pumping weights) doesn't work for another (doing homework for an accounting class). You need to let your brain speak for itself and find what works for you. Then, go from there. Allow yourself to take some risks and make some mistakes (the vote is still out for Reggaeton but the exit poll does not look good).

This all leads back to why I think without some major organ transplants, rock is officially dead. Think about all the major rock stations on the radio and how much the modern stuff is blending with hip-hop. That's not an accident. Rock by itself was a blending of older stuff from jazz to African tribal music to Irish folk. Skiffle, man…ever hear of it? It was a style of music in the UK that the Beatles played before they started covering guys like Chuck Berry. So, rock took from a pile of genres to make something original that could stand on its own. No one planned this of course, but it happened anyway. Bruce told me over a smoke about how some policies just happen in the course of business. He called it the University Sidewalk theory. The theory goes that when a university is built, they do the sidewalks last. People naturally find the closest routes between buildings - nothing was decided, it just happened. So, the theory goes, find out what they're doing naturally and build on that - don't make a policy that pulls against people's natural instinct or you'll get more resistance.

Music is even more subject to people's whims than sidewalks or business policies - that's just the nature of it. It's art, it is human expression; Rock, sad to say, isn't doing it for people any more. You can look at a lot of different reasons why but they boil back down to one basic truth: money killed rock and roll. Money was behind the reasons you heard all your favorite singles in the 60s and 70s being used to hawk products until you couldn't hear "Rock n' Roll" by LZ without thinking of Cadillac or hear "Start Me Up" by the Stones without thinking of Microsoft. That's the first and biggest answer but it goes deeper than that.

Like I said before, I find groupies of any music genre to be annoying. Where jazz or other highbrow art groupies inspire me to random acts of vandalism, rock groupies are simply sad and pathetic. Whenever you go to a concert at Shoreline and see those over-40 women with the facial features of a worn-out truck tire. They're always too loud and too quick to laugh at things that weren't funny. The guys with natty beards and beer guts who drive Escalades, Explorers or Suburbans and have that suburban lifestyle down pat. Rock groupies can listen to "Mother's Little Helper" without a hint of irony. They can drive cars six times larger than you'll ever need. They can pay $90 for a seat at the Stones concert and $200 for an IPod. They can go to the Hard Rock Café or the House of Blues and consider it a cultural experience.

This, of course, is the real issue with rock and why it needs to die. The commercialism of it has enabled the people with whom the true values of youth, rebellion and hedonism to act like they, too, belong. It's given people who by all rights should have grown up, got a job and started acting their age years ago an excuse to keep rubbing the lamp until the Genie comes out. Last night, I happened upon the Suncoast video store in the mall and found that they're finally going out of business. No surprise there but what was amusing was the clerk inside. He just found out that they were closing last week and took pains to remind everyone in earshot how inconvenient this was for him. At his job 13 years….have to go to the unemployment line…blahblahblah. I had to laugh - 13 years at a mall job?? What were you thinking, man? He was really upset and it occurred to me later that he should be going, "Thank you for finally giving me the push I needed to go to something more with my life." Ugh…13 years at Suncoast man. Just boggles the mind how people get stuck in ruts so deeply that pretty soon, the rut is all they have.

Rock is kind of like that, too. It's a mental rut that the American middle class is stuck in. Mentally comfortable but when you really look at it - it isn't doing much for them. The attempts they make to rejuvenate it and somehow make it relevant so that they can feel less guilty about spending time with it have become comical, silly. It's given people an excuse not to grow as persons because rock for so long was this raw, primal thing where people were *totally* about experiencing the most, the best of life that they could.

At some point, the realities of capitalism took over and now guys like Bill Graham or Michael Lang were marginalized (although Lang did help produce Woodstock '94 and '99…although I'm not sure he'd want to take credit for them). Nowadays, concerts are put on by corporate-sponsored arenas and such. No big thing there, even Bill G's name lives on as the corporation that puts together local music acts. You can mourn it all you want but it's far better to realize the truth: it is what it is.

So all that being said, I return to what I originally started out with. Rock has survived by changing many times. From doo-wop to Mop Tops to Hippies to New Wave to Heavy Metal to Grunge to Alt-Rock to Nu Metal/Rapcore. If it does survive, it'll be because it died and gave birth to itself in a new form. Human expression doesn't stop, it just changes direction.

- Tim Woolery - 02/08/2006