Episode IX:

DIARY OF A FADING ROCKSTAR

EPISODE IX: ‘They were the heroes of old, men of renown’

We’re lookin’ for a plan of action, lookin’ for a plan of action - U.K. Subs

A friend I hadn’t seen in years came through town recently, and while we were hanging out said with a wistful tone: “I miss the old Erik, the one I used to know.”

“What’s so different between me now, and the Erik you used to know? Besides the fact that I’m fatter, older looking and have gray hair?”

“You used to be a Man of Action,” my friend replied.

A Man of Action. I like the sound of that. It brings to mind images like my favorite late 60’s Marvel Comics icon, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (not the Hasselhoff version, not the Samuel L. Jackson version, I’m talking about the Jim Steranko version. Google yourself silly on that one.) When I was a kid I would picture myself in that skin-tight blue uniform, a gun strapped to every limb, swinging from a cable hanging out of a jet plane, cigar stuck to my lower lip, orange flames leaping from the muzzle of my machine pistol as I slaughtered wholesale the despicable enemies of Truth, Justice, and The American Way.

This is what the song “Stories For Boys” from U2’s first album is about. Listen to it. “There’s a place I go when I am far away/There’s a TV show, and I will go/Sometimes a hero takes me,/Sometimes I come and go/Stories for boys...” I imagine some of you girls liked these stories too. Otherwise we wouldn’t be so used to cheering on Angelina Jolie wasting a mansion full of bad guys while wearing nothing but white silk jammies. The scene where she smacks that guy in the face with the front wheel of her motorcycle - God, that is so awesome. But anyway, I digress.

There’s something about youth that gravitates towards the fast and the furious, Vin Diesel exploding through a wall of glass with a shotgun in each hand, Wesley Snipes as Blade slashing through hordes of exploding vampires.....it’s part of what youth is all about, this incendiary life energy that urgently seeks release. Everything seems of life or death importance. Somebody made fun of my hair at school - THEY MUST DIE!! Hell must have a special place for the person who made guns available to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine Shooters.....because every one of their fantasies struck me to the heart with their familiarity. I went to school with dozens of Harris and Klebolds. Dozens, at least. The only difference was they couldn’t get their hands on the hardware.

This is the imagination of youth: The power to change reality. Sometimes violently. Violent political movements are usually fueled by the young, whether as shock troops or cannon fodder. Young people are often fanatics, about bands, sports teams, politics, gangs, you name it, they’ll fight for it. It’s a hormonal thing. Everything is black or white, left or right, all or nothing. As kids we wanted to be the best good guy that ever was, who always wins, or the worst bad guy who ever lived, feared by all. We were into extreme music, extreme fashions, extreme sports, extreme violence, extreme sex when we had that seemingly endless fountain of energy at our disposal. All that disconcerting “ultra-hardcore” porn that the talk shows are whimpering about is the provenance of people between the ages of 15 and 20. Count on it. If you want a true cultural biopsy of this past decade, look no further than “Grand Theft Auto”.

So what does all this have to do with music? Everything. Because every movie has a soundtrack, and the soundtrack of action is Rock and Roll. A huge chunk of GTA’s marketing budget goes toward the music they use in the TV commercials. In John McTiernan’s blindingly ahistorical remake of “Rollerball” [MGM/Sony, 2002], the soundtrack even appears as a character - a Nu-Metal house band who blasts every time the violence ramps up on the track. When the Sons of Anarchy ride to war against the Aryan Nations [“Sons of Anarchy” (TV series), FX, 2009], “Hands In The Sky” by Straylight Run creeps up in hair-raising fashion, evoking an ominous specter of violence. [And if you ever wonder “What was that song on Episode 12 Season 2?”, the official web site has helpful links to each and every one. If that doesn’t prove that Rock and Roll is a convenient tie-in with television and films, I don’t know what could.] David Lynch employs rock music with furious effectiveness in “Lost Highway” [October Films, 1997] - since his films are about 90% atmosphere, the music is center stage rather than ancillary. It seems at first glance an overblown gesture to populate a film soundtrack with Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson and Rammstein; but taken as a whole, the film really is all about the sort of dislocation that rock music has been the soundtrack for since the invention of the hydrogen bomb.

When we were kids, Rock and Roll was the soundtrack inside our skull to every imagined adventure we were incapable of living, and every cold-sweat nightmare we woke up from shaking. We swung from imaginary trees as Tarzan, ran from giant blobs like Steve McQueen, rappelled down building faces with S.W.A.T., and practiced cowboy Kung Fu with David Carradine - and every moment of it was accompanied by loud guitars and shouted vocals [even if it took network television a while to figure it out - how much adrenaline can you really pump listening to a cheesy disco track?].

So naturally, while it was all well and good to have a smart suit, a Walther PPK and a license to kill from Her Majesty’s Secret Service, it was even better to be the dude playing the guitar riff over it. To BE the soundtrack inside people’s heads to whatever adventure they imagined. That seemed to contain so much power it was almost sickening to think of it. What do you want to be when you grow up, Erik? I want to be a spy, a superhero, a pirate, an astronaut, an assassin, an FBI agent, a barbarian swordsman, a genius crimefighter, a guy swinging from a rope while firing a machine gun.....but most of all, I want to be the guy singing songs about them. I want to ululate unearthly wails about black swords, coming from a land of ice and snow, on a highway to Hell! Rock and Roll was an all-encompassing aesthetic umbrella over every boyhood adventure fantasy, every dream of fame and glory, the whole damned thing.

Besides, if you’re James Bond, you only get to make love to one beautiful woman at a time, and she always gets killed afterwards. If you’re Captain Kirk, it’s just one green-skinned alien exotic dancer per show. But if you’re Robert Plant.....you’ve got armies of lust-crazed teenaged girls who want to feast on your flesh like zombies! All at once! Until you are crushed, asphyxiated, trampled, torn limb from limb, and sucked completely dry! Why do you think so many male rock stars kept to their trailers, shooting up heroin? They were hiding from the women!

The most enjoyable part of the adventure of being a rock and roll musician, for me, was being on the road. It has been likened by some to being in a roving band of barbarian raiders landing on the peaceful shores of a monastery or a village, looting and pillaging and leaving nothing but ashes in their wake; but for me it was more like being a National Geographic writer examining the native way of life in towns far from my own. Perhaps there were elements of being a preacher at a big tent revival as well, but largely it seemed as if I were crashing a party that was already going on - particularly at the college gigs.

Without necessarily knowing anything about our band before coming to the show, people came (naturally) with the expectation of being entertained -- but I had the crazy and inexplicable expectation that I would somehow change them, give them an experience they would never forget. Some took to this nicely, and some did not. I suppose it had something to do with their level of intoxication. In any case, people were able to take from it whatever they needed - entertainment, release from boredom, wild abandon, provocation, food for thought. For a very small number - most times no more than two or three in a crowd of dozens, scores, hundreds - something happened that could not be put into words, something that changed them, the way rock and roll had changed me. It might be that afterwards they looked for the hidden magic under the surface of everything; or that they decided they were going to start their own band; or maybe that night they decided “Let’s wait until next week to decide whether I really want to go forward with my plan to end it all.” These were all things that had been done for me, and I hoped to somehow pass those things on.

If there is something universally sorcerous and heroic about rock and roll, then it stands to reason that there must be a corresponding heroic archetype to every rockstar - or one that stands out among several. Jim Morrison was likened by many [Oliver Stone, for example] to the Greek god Dionysos, god of ritual ecstasy [cf. Wikipedia]. Robert Plant called himself a “Golden God”, which can be interpreted as Apollo, or Lugh, or Freyr, or Ra; can’t you just see him riding his flaming chariot across the sky singing “AhAAHAAAAAH AAAAh!!” Patti Smith is obviously the Oracle at Delphi, or the Cumaean Sybil, perhaps with one of the Furies mixed in. Sinead O’Connor is Joan of Arc; Jeff Beck is Mercutio, or some other swashbuckling swordsman; Michael Stipe is the shine-pated, oblique Silver Surfer, full of portentous pronouncements no one understands; Ice Cube is the true life incarnation of the fictional character Mister T., as ebullient as an undertaker. Elvis Presley for a time was as close as rock and roll would ever get to Superman; Morrissey is Peter Parker; John Lennon is Christ, and so on.

Have you ever played the game “If you were a superhero, what would your super power be?” The thing of it is, with a little practice, you can actually get real super powers if the hero you want to be is a musician. Depending on what it is you want to do, the only real effort required is having the guts to stick your neck out. I have many friends who are musicians or artists of some type, and they are real-life superheroes to me. I often find myself picturing them with capes and boots.

Here are some other real-life kinds of people I think are superheroes:

Single parents

Teachers

Recovered addicts

People who work with their hands for a living - building, landscaping, assembling, sewing, welding, etc.

People who are willing to march in the streets for what they believe

People in wheelchairs

Farmers

I was your typical punk rock hater of cops when I was a kid - all cops were authority junkies, violent pigs, etc. It’s when I learned what cops actually have to do day in and day out just to keep the streets functional that caused me to temper my prejudice; I literally saw them in a different light. They are people who are willing to get shot at so I don’t have to. I feel the same way about soldiers. I may disagree with, or even hate the uses they are put to, but their willingness to sacrifice their own personal safety for the good of others can’t be downplayed. Fire fighters are close to the top of the list, particularly those crazy f?!?ers who jump out of planes and helicopters into forest fires. Running headlong into a burning building - what could be more rock and roll than that?

My favorite moment of the meeting of heroes was when the Who played a tribute concert for the first responders of New York City after 9/11. While the band performed “Won’t Get Fooled Again” with power and exuberance, really putting their souls and backs into it because of the setting, the cameras kept lighting on a uniformed cop in the front row with a manic expression on his face, pumping his fist in the air for his heroes and singing along with the words. You could tell that the band felt the same way about their audience. It was pretty intense.

A lot of people get into this line of work for a lot of reasons, but mostly I think it’s because there’s no actual Professor Xavier’s School For Mutants, no Hogwarts, no Starfleet Academy in real life. The most accessible form of superheroism is to “Get yourself an electric guitar, then take some time and learn how to play” [‘So You Wanna Be A Rock and Roll Star’, the Byrds, 1967]. We want to be people of action, to inject something extraordinary into our ordinary lives. Witness the huge interest in karaoke and now the Rock Band game, not to mention a Hollywood movie about a guy who plays air drums. Any movement or undercurrent in the popular music sphere that encourages those who dare to “Do It Yourself” is welcome, and these periodic occurrences are like water in the desert.

Another hero of mine (and of many people), the late John Lennon, says in ‘Instant Karma’: “Who on Earth do you think you are -- a superstar? Well right you are!” And hey, if John Lennon said it, it must be true.