The occasion of MAGNET's anniversary has a lot of us reflecting on just what the hell we think we've been up to the last 15 years. It turns out that what I've been up to is the slow, inexorable, sometimes painful realization that I'm as full of shit as everybody else. No way, gasp you, the loyal reader of this space. Surely you (that is, me) are joking, setting me (that is, you the loyal reader) up for some delightful and well-crafted punchline. But no, not this time. There is no joke. At least I don't think there is. I really have come to the conclusion that I'm precisely as full of shit as everyone else.
Here's why this is relevant for discussion purposes: When you're given the privilege of a space like this to communicate with some number of random strangers, it's assumed by all parties that you somehow deserve that privilege. That you've earned it. If I don't feel like I have something worth saying, then there's no way I sit down at my laptop and tweeze every painful one of the 1,100 to 1,300 required words from the shriveled lobes of my poor sodden brain. And if you don't feel like I have something worth saying, even if you think that only because it's sitting there on the final page of an otherwise really good and fun and smart music magazine, then you don't make it this far. That doesn't mean you automatically agree with what I'm saying, incidentally-only that you start reading this thing on faith that it belongs here.
So it has become kind of troubling for your humble narrator to continue to fill this space while growing ever more aware and certain that he (that is, I) is (am) just as full of shit as everyone else.
It will pain Scott Colan to know that he tipped the first domino in this line of self-awareness. The night I met the irascible Mr. Colan, at one time the bassist for a most excellent Philadelphia psych-rock band called Lenola, he opened the conversation with, "Phil Sheridan! Why are you so fucking angry?" It took several pints of brown ale and a lot of boring exposition to convince him that I'm not angry. I'm almost never angry. My explanation was that The Back Page columns, theretofore the only way he knew me, were written in a kind of "voice." It was as if I were in character, and the character was this bitter, cynical, pissed-off grouch.
I was the music-critic equivalent of the guy who yells at the neighbor kids to get the hell off his lawn. In real life, the neighbor kids are on my lawn right now. My friend Roob (you'd know him if you saw him) has played a role in the slow dawning. Whenever I express some consternation about the usually long-overdue next Back Page, Roob likes to affect a concerned expression, pause for effect, then say something like, "Why don't you write something about how music was better and more genuine 20 years ago than it is now with all the downloading and shitty radio stations?"
Thanks, pal.
But the realization didn't settle in completely, I admit, until I started paying attention to the occasional letters sent in by readers of this space. Especially the angry ones. It's all too easy to dismiss those as coming from people who don't "get it" or who have no sense of humor or who are just flipping assholes. And sometimes one or all of those things are true. But sometimes, it became clear, I was one or all of those things and the readers were right.
So: just precisely as full of shit as everyone else.
So: what to do?
For this super-deluxe, extra-special 15th-anniversary edition, at least, the answer to that is to come clean. To out myself, in a manner of speaking. To admit that I'm just as full of shit as everyone else, including you and you and you and you and, especially, that guy over there. To step out of the "character" and drop the "voice" and try to explain what about music led me to write this column in the first place, 13 long years ago. And I have to borrow the words of Russell Hammond, as played by Billy Crudup in Almost Famous: "To begin with? Everything."
That's the truth. The one true and constant and never-failing thing in my life has been music. From childhood, when I tried to find meaning in my parents' Ray Conniff Singers 8-tracks (only later did I realize they'd been scammed by the Columbia House program, which sent this crap and forced you either to send it back or pay), right up until last week, when I was blown away by the latest Okkervil River album, I have been endlessly enchanted and moved and thrilled and astonished by new music, new voices, new ideas.
I'd be that guy, the voracious MAGNET reader, if I weren't writing for the magazine. But writing for MAGNET has brought me all kinds of gifts that I couldn't otherwise have imagined:
Drinking with (the right) half of Cheap Trick.
Getting hugged by the supernaturally talented Robert Pollard and talking painting with the criminally talented Tobin Sprout.
Hanging out with the Wrens.
Interviewing Jeff Tweedy, Jack Logan, Ben Folds, Nic Dalton, Matt Keating, the brilliant members of the Mendoza Line and the remarkable songwriting team behind the Vulgar Boatmen, Robert Ray and Dale Lawrence.
Giving the aforementioned Folds a commemorative MAGNET Zippo lighter after a set at the Khyber in Philadelphia, just after the first Ben Folds Five album came out.
Chatting with Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, then later pointing him out to my daughters when he was playing on TV with R.E.M.: "That one, with the pink hair."
There were countless shows, some backstage passes, too many beers consumed. There were handshakes and intense conversations and laughter at shared musical embarrassments and enthusiasms. As fun as that was, it was sort of beside the point. The point was the music. The point was standing for too long in some too-hot, too-smoky bar and thinking about getting the hell out of there and getting some sleep, then being rewarded by a transcendent moment: an inspired guitar solo or perfectly played song or beautifully hit harmony part or delightfully unexpected cover.
It's the pursuit of those moments that makes you read the review, buy the ticket, download the song, wait around the merch table after the set to say hi to the drummer. It's the pursuit of those moments that keeps me slipping into character and assuming the voice and barking at you damn kids to get off my lawn.
And I'm just as full of shit as all of you, which is to say, I'm not full of shit at all.
—Phil Sheridan
Raising children is the ultimate opportunity to indulge your music snobbery. For anyone who writes about music or just plain spends way too much time listening to it, thinking about it and standing in bars for three hours waiting to see someone play it, kids are your golden chance to replicate your own magnificent taste in the personality of another living human being. (Or two or three of them.) Except for the minor problem that it doesn’t work.
Before we go any further, let’s get rid of the Clockwork Orange-y image you might’ve been forming of Little Alex with his eyelids forced open, watching violent images and listening to Old Ludwig Van as part of his social reconditioning. We’re not talking about force-feeding our favorite tunes to helpless young children here, although God help the toddler who fucks with the stereo on my watch.
Kidding, kidding. Seriously, though, it’s a heady thing to realize when they’re young that you have virtually complete control of what your kids hear. As a parent, you are able—and perhaps obligated—to create a top-40-radio-free environment for your offspring. You wouldn’t store leaky barrels of benzene in the nursery, so why would you allow strangers to fill your children’s impressionable brains with shitty music?
As the 24 longtime readers of this column know, I’m an old cuss. My daughters, known briefly and Seussically as Thing One and Thing Two, are all but grown now. And while I didn’t tape headphones to their cherubic little noggins in the cradle so they could hear the complete works of the Kinks in their sleep (well, not often, anyway), I like to think they grew up with good music playing in the house and with access to a pretty solid collection of CDs and records. Books and movies, too, but we’re here to talk about music.
My older daughter (Thing One, as you may have guessed) made the grievous error of showing an interest. This led to a long (for her), enthusiastic (for me) apprenticeship in which I tried shamelessly to clone my exact aesthetic sensibility in her mind. The younger one, seeing the gruesome fate that befell her sister, never took the bait when I’d try to catch her attention. I would nonchalantly slide a CD she might like into the car stereo when we were about to go somewhere, hoping it would lead her to listen on her own time. Alas, the conversations tended to go:
Thing Two: “What’s this?”
Pater familias: “This is the Replacements. Minneapolis band. Mid-1980s. What do you think?”
TT: “Can I put on the radio?”
PF: “Wait, check out this part ... ”
TT: “Can I please put on the radio?”
PF: [Inaudible].
But the older daughter, she was into it. I’d happily discover all the Wilco CDs missing from the shelf one week, a couple of Bevis Frond discs the next. She loved the Who and the Kinks and the Rolling Stones and the Clash and the Mats and Nirvana and Pavement and They Might Be Giants and the Wrens. I took her to see the Stones and the Who, Guided By Voices and Superchunk. We met Paul Westerberg at an in-store thing. Oh, and she went out and found her own favorites, too: Moldy Peaches, Bright Eyes and really, I don’t know who all.
So when she went away to college in the fall, I felt like I’d done my job. If in these troubled times you can raise a daughter to be healthy, bright, engaging, possessed of a good self-image and almost completely Xtina free, well, you can feel pretty good about things. If she goes on to listen to lite-rock or soft-country hits later in life, well, that’s on her. We can’t live their lives for them. I thought I’d done just swell until fucking Patrick got into the act.
Patrick is my friend. He’s a good man and a great person to talk about music with. He also happens to live in Chicago, where Thing One had enrolled in college, and was kind enough to look out for her. Music was an obvious subject for getting-acquainted type conversations. The e-mails started coming almost immediately.
“How can she never have heard Traffic?”
“Didn’t you have any Zappa in your house?”
“Phil, this girl has no idea who XTC is.”
At first, I would try to be polite, which is my usual policy. I pride myself on not being one of those music snobs who shits all over civilians when they mention a band they like or, worse, a band they think I might like. I’m large-minded enough to concede the possibility that some people really, really enjoy the music of Beyoncé and Maroon 5. The younger me assumed it was all about exposure and social engineering—that people would prefer better music if they had ready access to it—but maybe not. The longest line in every food court I’ve ever been in is at McDonald’s. I get it. The point is, I’m long past the point of trying to change people’s minds.
But here I was getting a double-barreled blast of disbelief and, dare I say, scorn over my lack of Traffic records. I kept it civil: Sorry, man. Just kind of missed the boat on that one. Zappa? Love Zappa. Saw him in 1978 at the Tower Theater. Just didn’t play “Dong Work For Yuda” to my nine-year-old daughter, that’s all. There were some boundaries in Casa Sheridan. XTC? I always thought they were fine. I was never that into them. I loved Squeeze around that era, but I never really bought any XTC albums. It didn’t seem like a character flaw until I got Patrick’s e-mail.
This time, I replied with a little more edge, writing something to the effect that Andy Partridge was insufferably smug (which is true, right?) and I thought the band was overrated. All style, no heart. Something like that. It wasn’t really what I believed, but at this point, it felt as if my parenting had been called into question. What kind of man denies his children the opportunity to hear Skylarking? Did you beat them with a belt while you were at it? In fairness, I must accentuate the fact that Patrick didn’t accuse me of beating anyone with a belt. That part was in my head. Thing is, I had gotten defensive and responded by lashing out at XTC. Poor, smug Andy and the other two guys were but collateral damage.
The reality is that everyone has gaps in their cultural awareness. I only own one Dylan album. Zero by Pearl Jam. I know people who listen to nothing but Dylan, who are obsessive about Eddie Vedder. I know what they’re about, know a fair amount of their work—enough to get it, anyway. I just didn’t click with them. I own tons of Neil Young stuff. Like him better than Dylan. Pearl Jam just didn’t register while Nirvana was happening. No big deal.
It could be that I’m really bothered because my beloved first-born is now hearing great music from another source. I don’t think so. That’s been the case for a while, anyway, and besides, one of the great joys of being a parent is seeing your children blossom and grow and experience new things. So it’s cool if my old pal tries to fill in some gaps in my daughter’s musical education. He can lend her Traffic, Zappa and XTC records, and he has. The other night, in a generous and all-embracing mood, I asked Thing One how she liked that Traffic CD.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t listened to it.”
Damn, I love that kid.
I spent a lot of time thinking about fame this summer. It started with the story I wrote elsewhere in this issue about a band called the Mendoza Line, which was as successful at ducking fame as it was at making great records. I followed the thread to a live performance by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the stars of the movie Once, who were astonished by the film’s impact on their music careers. Before its release, they had played to a tiny crowd at the Tin Angel, an intimate folk club in Philadelphia. Now they were playing at a sold-out theater-style venue in Philly that’s hosted everyone from Radiohead to Ray Davies.
Hansard is also the lead singer and songwriter for the Frames, an Irish band that’s been plugging away since the early ‘90s. He was all too keenly aware that this little independent film was making a bigger splash than his entire career with the Frames.
“It’s like I’ve spent the last 17 years knocking on the world’s door,” Hansard said from the stage. “And now the world suddenly has turned around and said, ‘What do you want?’”
All those years seeking fame, and now he was freaked out to get a taste of it.
Meanwhile, for reasons best left unexplained, I attended two giant outdoor shed-type shows this summer. One featured John Mayer, the other Toby Keith. I didn’t much care for either performance—Mayer is the blandest rock star of all time, Keith is a shameless huckster—but I got an illuminating glimpse into the nature of fame. Watching Mayer pump out his vanilla hits, I thought of something the Mendoza Line’s Timothy Bracy had told me. His band had just played a set in New York and was sitting down with some heavy hitter from the music industry. Said Big Shot was explaining his strategy for breaking the band, laying out exactly what it would take to become famous.
“We looked at each other,” Bracy said, “and the distinct feeling was that none of us could imagine doing any of the things this guy wanted us to do.”
As powerful as the lure of fame is, there’s an undercurrent pulling some people in the opposite direction. And this, at long last, is sort of where I begin to get to the point. The Mendoza Line was a band in a grand rock tradition of self-defeating, self-sabotaging fame-averse artists. My first exposure to this idea was in John Mendelsohn’s brilliant liner notes for the compilation The Kink Kronikles. Ray Davies explained that he liked the name “Kinks” because, like a kink in your neck, “it’s something people don’t really want.” Compared to the approval-seeking antics of the Beatles, this was both revolutionary and intriguing to my young mind.
It was evident in many others. Big Star. Badfinger. The mid-’70s punk explosion was detonated by this idea. Attention was good, but only if you earned it a certain way. Playing by the record labels’ rules—slick music, slick image, slick photo shoots—was out. Artistic integrity was in. Money and fame were acceptable only on the artists’ terms.
This was probably bullshit, but as a teenager, I bought it. So did people like Paul Westerberg, Bob Mould, Michael Stipe and Paul Hewson, who spearheaded the next generation of great rock ’n’ roll bands. Knowing what a freaking diva Stipe became, it’s easy to view those early R.E.M. videos as if they were mere affectations. But at the time, in real time, R.E.M. was a band conscientiously avoiding the well-marked, highly traveled paved road to fame. Fame came, of course, but it was on the group’s terms. The same was true of Hewson’s band, U2. Before he was Bono, Nobel Peace Prize candidate, Hewson was an Irish kid studying Clash albums as if they held the secrets of the universe. (They do, by the way, but that’s another story.)
Westerberg and the Replacements were the most direct adherents to the Kinks’ approach, fighting each other as well as anything that might make them famous: “The sweet smell that you adore,” sang Westerberg, “well I think I’d rather smother.”
If all this seems terribly precious or beside-the-point to you, please consider this: The push-and-pull I’m talking about is what destroyed Kurt Cobain. When you look out into the audience and see the people you hate—or more to the point, the people who previously hated you—singing along to your most personal thoughts and feelings, that will seriously fuck up your shit. And poor Kurt’s shit was so fucked up, he could only think of one way out of the trap. The stakes aren’t always as high as life and death, but they’re pretty damn high.
Let’s fast-forward to an image of Joe Strummer from the documentary Let’s Rock Again!, which I happened to catch on cable one brain-numbed, channel-surfing evening. A man who belongs in any conversation about the greatest figures in rock history was reduced to pleading with some clueless fuckhead New Jersey DJ to play just one track from his most recent album. At one point, Strummer was cheerfully walking around the boardwalk in Atlantic City, trying to persuade passersby to attend his show that night.
There’s no way to explain the tears in my eyes as I watched this without referring to the Mendoza Line and Once and John Mayer and Toby Keith or invoking the names of Davies and Big Star’s Alex Chilton and Westerberg and Cobain. By the time Strummer and the Clash were successful, commercially speaking, they were through artistically. (Really, “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”) As Strummer says several times in Let’s Rock Again!, he took 12 years off. The world kept spinning without him. By the time he was making really vital music again with his band the Mescaleros, no one gave a shit. He might as well have been Hansard and the Frames, knocking on the world’s door and being ignored.
So all of this was swirling around my noggin, and it got me wondering why exactly it mattered so much to me. Being a famous or obscure rock ’n’ roll artist isn’t relevant to my day-to-day life, you know? Of course you know. It isn’t relevant to most of us in our real lives. Or is it?
It sunk in that, in my own way and at my own level, I had lived my life much more like the Kinks and the Replacements than John Mayer and Toby Keith. I was never going to scoot up the corporate ladder, never going to wear the right suit or get the right haircut or kiss the right ass. In my line of work as a sports reporter, there’s no shortage of people who’ll go anywhere at any time of the day or night if there’s a TV camera set up there. Flip on ESPN some afternoon and you’ll see them shouting, mugging and acting as if they have all the answers. They have agents, they network, they cajole for airtime, they dye their hair. It’s as far from rock ’n’ roll as you can get, but the dynamic is the same.
Why do I get a queasy feeling when a TV or radio producer calls and asks me to appear on air? Why do I feel like a tin-plated phony when I give in and agree? Suddenly, I had an answer. I’ve been operating according to an ethos that makes almost no sense to anyone, trusting a gag reflex that isn’t doing me any good whatsoever. The sweet smell of TV gigs, expensive clothes and glib banter? I think I’d rather smother.
One of the obvious reasons to write about pop (or any other kind of) culture is the belief that you can somehow change it. Maybe you can nudge it in a certain direction or, by sheer force of your impeccable taste and powerful prose, convince every living human being to drop what they’re doing and listen (I mean really listen this time) to a certain artist or album.
This is, of course, ridiculous. Nobody will ever hear the Stones’ “Torn And Frayed” or Uncle Tupelo’s “High Water” or the Vulgar Boatmen’s “You Don’t Love Me Yet” precisely the way I hear them. I can type from now until the Cows reunite and it won’t matter. You’ll hear and like what you want, I’ll hear and like what I want, and as long as we can occasionally nod our heads knowingly in time with the same song, things are cool. And music and art and books and movies will evolve as they will, no matter how many words are wasted yearning for the good old days.
What, the alert reader asks, happened to this doofus? Aren’t those so-called, probably nonexistent good old days—when every band had a cool name, two guitars, bass and drums and excellent T-shirts for sale at a reasonable price—the entire raison d’etre for this so-called, probably nonexistent place we call The Back Page? What changed?
Simple answer: science.
It’s true. I learned some freaking science, and it changed everything for me. More precisely, I learned some interesting science a while ago and connected it to the subject at hand very recently during the height of a four-day, no-sleep experience, the less said about which, the better. It just kind of hit me.
Culture follows the laws of the universe as we currently understand them. We can no more go back to a time when savvy label chiefs found and signed great bands and recorded them to vinyl LPs than we can go back to the eons when the universe was about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Shit moves in one direction, and that direction is outward.
It would be risky for me to get into a lengthy discussion on the physics of the universe, for two reasons. One, it might bore you enough to send you leafing back through the reviews in reverse order. Two, and even more important, I know almost nothing about the physics of the universe. I’d probably just invite lots of letters from astronomy majors telling me what a doofus I am, and frankly, I’m already in Dutch with those guys. (Long story involving a kite, some kerosene and the Palomar Observatory; buy me a beer sometime and I’ll explain.)
Simple version: There was a tiny dot containing all the matter in the universe. There was what alliteration-adoring atomic scientists called a Big Bang, which sent all that matter shooting outward at incredible rates of speed. Stars and galaxies and planets and black holes and Thom Yorke and quarks and quasars were formed.
Now the scary part: We’re still moving. The universe is still spreading outward, rushing toward some unknowable place. Maybe it bends back in on itself. Maybe it snaps back like a damn rubber band and we all wind up cramped back up in that tiny dot. (Another good argument for wearing deodorant every day.) Maybe it just stretches so thin that it all finally breaks apart, drifts away and disappears. That would suck, but scientists who study this stuff say it may happen as soon as next Thursday at around 2 p.m.
OK, now that we have a firm grasp on how the universe works, you can see how it connects to my new theory about culture. Once there was very little of it, then there was a fair amount of very dense material, and now it’s flung so far outward that it’s almost impossible to keep track of anymore.
You want an example. Fine. Let’s start with music. It began with primitive man banging sticks on rocks to make a pleasing rhythm. Gradually, other instruments were invented. We know they played lutes and such in the days of ancient Greece. Then, for roughly 1,500 years, all Western music was about God and Jesus. Something like five Viennese guys wrote symphonies and wore powdered wigs. There were one or two well-known composers at a time for a couple hundred years. Come the 20th century, there started to be genres of music: jazz, folk, country, bluegrass, gospel, then rock ’n’ roll and later hip hop.
In the 1940s, there were maybe a half-dozen popular recording artists of real note. In the ’50s and ’60s, that blew up exponentially into dozens and hundreds. And so on. Once there were a handful of big record companies dictating what you heard, then there were dozens, then hundreds of independent labels. Now we’re nearing the point where there will be no labels, just Web sites and MySpace pages and roughly 17.4 million artists performing in almost the same number of genres, sub-genres and genre mashups. There are now more bands with the word “wolf” in their name than there were bands in 1974.
The same trends apply in other arts. The reason we study The Iliad today is that Homer was the only guy writing books back then. Shakespeare was big not just because he could flat-out bring it, iambic pentameter-wise, but because he didn’t have a lot of competition. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain ran into each other at a lot of writer’s workshops, because they were the only writers. Hemingway and Fitzgerald and who? Steinbeck, maybe. Walk into a Barnes & Noble now. There are more women writers with three names than there were writers in 1930.
Painting? There were the Old Masters. There were the Impressionists and post-Impressionists and Cubists and so on. And now what? There are more talented, brilliant painters out there than ever before. It’s just that no one outside of a few collectors in New York or London have ever heard of them.
In a relatively short period of time, television has demonstrated this theory better than any other medium. From a few grainy, black-and-white broadcasts to three major networks to color to cable to digital cable to 15,000 options to watch at any given time, you can see the theory in action. There are now more CSI shows than there were networks in 1960.
With the spreading outward and speeding up of things, you get a serious thinning out. Not so much in terms of talent, although it often feels that way, but certainly of impact and status. Is it even possible for someone to write the Great American Novel now? Who could paint a masterpiece that changed anything outside of the artist’s immediate family? Can a TV series ever again impact society the way All In The Family did in the ’70s?
There are probably more good bands, more fine writers, more creative TV people, more immensely talented painters than ever before in history. New technology has allowed us to discover artists from all around the world. They’re out there. They’re doing great work. And it’s all just drifting off toward the void.
The further back you go, the closer to the rich, dense beginning of it all, the stars shine brighter and longer. Some of us feel the magnetic pull of those denser, richer stars. Some of us feel a little confused in the asteroid field that is current pop culture. That’s the nature of the universe. The future isn’t for us, which is fine. Because it’s gonna suck, big time.
The year 2007 marks exactly three decades since the Year of Punk, 1977, and it’s stunning for someone who cared then and cares now to attempt keeping score on how things all turned out. For me, the fundamental choice between the Sex Pistols and the Clash was a no-future no-brainer. It was Clash all the way. Joe Strummer and the lads were angry and righteous and filled with passion and, in their brave way, even hope. Johnny Rotten and his bunch were cynical little shits who yelped about anarchy as if they had any idea what that might actually be like.
Well, here we are, 30 years later. The Pistols were right, while Strummer’s grand message of hope is down in the ground with him and the worms. There is new music I like and new music I don’t much care for. There is no music that I believe in, and there won’t be again. So fuck it. Download some shit your friend likes and wonder why your attention span isn’t long enough to reach the end of this sentence. Turns out everything is pretty vacant after all. Here’s what the next 12 months will look like. Let’s hope we make it all the way to the end.
JANUARY
Get a good grip on your memory. If it doesn’t go back to the 1970s, you may want to read a book or two. See, Hollywood is coming for our icons next, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.
The madness started a couple years ago, when Jamie Foxx won an Oscar for doing the same damn Ray Charles imitation—side-to-side with the head, face taking in the air—that everybody does. Ray set the template: early family traumas, love of music, a love story, some success, battles with drink and drugs, temptation that fucks up the earlier love story, pressure from The Man, redemption, decent soundtrack. Last year it was Johnny Cash and June Carter, essayed in Walk The Line by Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon. She got the Oscar this time.
As usual, the first sign of trouble came from my daughters. They loved Walk The Line. They loved Johnny Cash. Trouble is, they loved Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash. The real Johnny Cash was that old, gross guy who did the Nine Inch Nails cover, then died from being old and gross. Joaquin, on the other hand, is still young, handsomer than old John ever was and benefited from someone yelling “cut!” every time he was about to do the deed with a groupie.
Walk The Line also falls victim to a common conceit in TV and movies. The first wife is always portrayed as a one-dimensional shrew-bitch from hell, so we don’t judge the main character too harshly when he cheats on her every 15 minutes. The first wife in Ray just didn’t understand him. The first wife in Walk The Line just didn’t understand him. The first wife is always someone the audience can’t wait to see get stomped on and left in the dust.
And then there’s this other trend that’s starting to worry me. People are starting to get awards not for acting—for creating a character from the printed word of a script and making that character seem more real than people you actually know—but for doing really good imitations. Three of the five nominees for Best Actor this past year: David Strathairn for imitating Edward R. Murrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman for his Truman Capote impersonation and good old Joaquin, who didn’t really sound like Johnny Cash but sang the songs pretty well in his own way.
Why am I on about this, you’re asking yourself. Two reasons: Mike Myers as Keith Moon. Elijah Wood as Iggy Pop. These are actual green-lighted movie projects, and they’re only the beginning. Believe me, before they’re done, every rock ’n’ roll icon worth talking about is going to be reduced to a two-dimensional caricature who endures early family trauma, falls in love while pursuing the dream of a music career, has some success, battles drink and drugs, faces temptation and pressure from The Man and then either experiences redemption or just dies. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
I have nothing against Mike Myers. He’s pretty funny. Does accents well. He’s also 43, which is 12 years older than Who drummer Keith Moon ever got to be. The idea of Myers playing Moon is almost as bad as making a movie about Moon in the first place. Elijah Wood is young enough to play Moon, but instead he’s going to play the physically menacing Iggy. Wood has been a Hobbit, so I guess he’s as qualified as anyone. But really? An Iggy Pop movie? Do you bring your own peanut butter to the multiplex?
Can you see Colin Farrell playing Shane MacGowan? How about Luke and Owen Wilson as Ray and Dave Davies? Or Bob and Tommy Stinson? Or both? Or Jake Gyllenhaal as Freddie Mercury and Heath Ledger (with his 10 Things I Hate About You hair) as Brian May in the Queen story? Felicity Huffman as David Bowie? Kevin Zegers, Huffman’s co-star from Transamerica, would be a perfect Kurt Cobain, maybe because he essentially played Kurt in Transamerica. Pretty much anyone could play the guys in Kiss, I guess. Or the Ramones. Just hand out ripped jeans and black leather jackets. Is Howard Stern too old to play Joey?
There are two major, deal-breaking problems with such films. First, movie people almost never get rock ’n’ roll right. Second, and worse, once there’s a film about a person, the real person is replaced forever by the movie image. And since the movies don’t get rock right, you’re looking at a really depressing revision of history.
One movie that got the music right is Almost Famous; Cameron Crowe was smart to base it around a fictional band. Billy Crudup and Jason Lee are really good and really convincing, but that’s because you weren’t sitting there thinking, “They don’t really look much like Page and Plant or Mick and Keith or whoever.” Crowe got the feel right—which makes sense, because he was there—by creating characters for his story. Well, there was Lester Bangs, played by none other than Philip Seymour Hoffman. Good warmup for Capote, huh?
But most movies that purport to be about rock music are so far off the mark that you can’t help but shudder at them. The reason, I think, is that movies cost so much and go through so much demographic analysis that even the good ones are made the same way the worst, blandest music is made. Films are never spontaneous. They can’t be. The really troubling thing, though, is the way the filmic version of a person seems more vivid and real than the actual person, and even sort of replaces that person in the collective memory.
Take this Moon bio, for instance. If you center on Moon, then you’ve already whiffed on the dynamic that made the Who one of the truly great rock bands. Pete Townshend was the bona fide creative genius of the Who, his vision realized by the varied gifts of Moon, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle. If you ignore the story of the band, picking up on Moon’s late-’70s misadventures with Ringo and Nilsson in L.A. and London, then what’s the point? You have a bloated, drunken former drummer who takes too many pills and dies. Either way, millions of people are going to see 43-year-old Mike Myers as Keith Moon forever after that. Just as my daughters came home from the theater thinking Johnny Cash was a moody, slim-hipped Joaquin Phoenix.
It already bothers me that great chunks of the past are breaking off and slipping away like pieces of glacier, never to be seen or heard from again. There are an awful lot of people out there whose idea of our musical heritage is the first season of American Idol.
It isn’t anyone’s fault, probably, or it’s everyone’s. When I was 18, the history of rock ’n’ roll was fairly manageable. You had to understand Elvis, Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry, plus the blues, then the British Invasion and the Summer of Love—and then punk coming along when rock started taking itself way too seriously. If the Arctic Monkeys were blowing my teenage doors off, I probably wouldn’t give a shit about any of that history, either. There’s just too much of it to bother with.
I guess what really sucks is that some kid like that is going to pay $9 to see a movie about Keith Moon, stare at the flat screen and the flatter plot, then leave with his apathy and ignorance of that glorious past totally vindicated. He’ll care even less, which is just scary. The only thing scarier? Mike Myers standing with his Oscar, thanking Roger and Pete and the late, great Keith Moon.
So you’re leafing through the ads in the Sunday paper and what to your wondering eyes should appear but the new Cat Power CD for $7.99. At Best Buy. This, you figure, is a great thing. Cheaper than iTunes, way cheaper than the $12.99 they’ll probably be charging at the local record store. And look: You can pick up Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire and a couple other titles at the same ridiculous price. It’s almost free, and therein, gentle indie rockers, lies the problem.
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