INSIGHTS

You may be right; I may be crazy, but I consider rock music to be just as important and serious an upper-case Art as any of those cerebrated and celebrated in this month’s issue. I know that’s not a grown-up thought, but the rock bug bit me at an early age, leaving me with a bad case of rockin’ pneumonia-for which, Chuck Berry fans can tell you, there is only one cure.

Like all teenaged boys in the late Sixties, I wanted to be John Lennon or Mick Jagger, or at least Eric Burdon. So I became a singer and organist in a string of mostly mediocre rock bands. The great thing was, we didn’t know how mediocre we were; blissfully ignorant, we were going to three-chord our way to the top. I was so sure of fame that I quit high school a month before graduation to go on the road, starting in Lawton, Oklahoma. The band broke up in Wolf Point, Montana (a real place), when the authorities discovered that our drummer was only 15. Two of us wanted to head for San Francisco, home of the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, but three realists prevailed in a bitter argument. We went back to Dallas.

I managed to graduate with correspondence courses, but I wasn’t cured yet. Two more years and an eardrum later, I landed in a band that could not miss. Our bass player was 5-foot-7, 270, and carried a pistol, but he could do perfect rip-offs of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and the guys in Three Dog Night, hot bands back then. I quit college without even dropping my classes. The Vietnam War was raging and I was slapped with a 1-A before I could say My Lai, but this band couldn’t miss.

Of course we missed, like thousands of others, and for the last time I decided to collect my books and get on back to school. I had a few regrets, but not many. I wasn’t getting rich. In two years of hotels and diners I’d saved enough for exactly one semester of college. Worse, I’d seen real talent overlooked, great local musicians like Bugs Henderson and Rocky Hill (who was better than his brother Dusty, of ZZ Top) playing for nothing in dives like the infamous Cellar Club. It was time, I thought, to grow up.

But a funny thing happened. Being the largest generation in American history, we had the numbers and the money to avoid growing up, at least musically. We packed concert halls to watch the Stones and the Beach Boys, men well into middle age, belt out the old favorites. Lennon and McCartney and Dylan and the Temptations became our version of Al Martino and Tony Bennett, our form of easy listening and “adult” music. I don’t think it will change. In the year 2020, blue-haired oldsters will be eating lunch in Luby’s and listening to the organist play that poignant melody from yesterday, Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.”

Back in the present, the older rock fan-anyone over 25-is always a bit apologetic about his obsession, and for good reason: You can never underestimate the taste of your fellow rock fans or guess which false prophet they’ll go chasing after next. I’m not just talking about the dark ages of disco or Mi-chaelmania. Consider that banner year for rock music, 1969. Among that year’s crop of great songs were Blood, Sweat and Tears’ “Spinning Wheel,” Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” the Stones’ “Honky-Tonk Woman,” the 5th Dimension’s anthem of the Love Generation, “Aquarius,” plus hits by the Guess Who, B.B. King and Steppenwolf. And what was the number one song in the world that year, selling more than six million copies? Why, “Sugar, Sugar” by the Archies, a non-group modeled on cartoon characters, with music by anonymous studio players. I know it’s only rock and roll, but sometimes I worry about it.

With the baby boomers growing in economic and political power, rock has become a major force in America. While symphonies and ballet troupes squeak by on shoestring budgets, Live Aid exports millions of dollars to help starving people. In the 1984 election, President Reagan, hoping to win every vote in the country, announced that he and Bruce Springsteen were soulmates. Walter Mondale, hoping to carry at least New Jersey, tried to reclaim Springsteen for the Democrats. Finally, the Boss had to repudiate the President, saying that people were being “manipulated and exploited” by Rea-ganism.

If any politics at all can be inferred from an album like Born in The USA, they are much closer to Mondale’s liberalism than to Reagan’s conservatism, but it’s fascinating that the issue even came up. Who would have thought, back when the Beatles hit, that one day a president of the United States would seek the endorsement of a rock singer?

Rock’s tent covers multitudes, from geniuses to juvenile delinquents and worse; hence the trend, among a few groups, toward vicious, sociopathic lyrics, like the Judas Priest song about forcing women to perform oral sex at gunpoint. It’s naive to object to some form of rating or labeling such lyrics. Ratings do not stop anyone from writing or producing songs-which would be unconscionable censorship-and given the example of the movies, it’s hard for even a libertarian to claim that rating song lyrics is the slippery slope to tyranny: The MPAA labels have in no way-discouraged the production of R- and X-rated films. Still, the song raters may be opening Pandora’s Box. It’s easy to flag extreme examples like the Judas Priest song, but where do you stop? How about that seemingly wholesome song by Huey Lewis, “The Power of Love”? Good beat, nice horns, but what’s this? “The power of love,” Lewis sings, is “stronger and harder than a bad girl’s dream.” Perhaps that line would net the song a label of LCBCAETAS (Language Can Be Construed As Encouraging Thoughts About Sex), or something. But rock has always been hormone music, from Little Richard to Prince, and any realistic rating system must take this into account, distinguishing between healthy and unhealthy attitudes toward sexuality. If they lump Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” with the sado-sleaze of Motley Crüe, it won’t work.

For all its diversity, most rock music is avariation on two lines from The Who:”Don’t try to dig what we all say,” and”Hope I die before I get old.” Pete Town-send, the author of those lyrics, didn’t. He’snow 43 and writing cryptic fiction. But hewas right in saying that rock divides thegenerations. When I point out some intricateharmony in an Eagles song to my teenageson, or explain how, at the end of “CarryThat Weight,” three of the Beatles tradeguitar leads, he listens to my history lessonand nods politely. But let Quiet Riot burst onwith “Cum on Feel the Noize,” and he can’tsit still. I’ll have my revenge, though. Waittill he tries to get his kids to appreciate Tearsfor Fears.