The Evolution of Music

I was five years old in February 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show was a 7:00 p.m. Sunday night ritual in our home, followed by Bonanza at 8:00. There I was sitting cross legged in front of the black and white television, ready for the evening’s entertainment.

            And then it happened.

            The Beatles. The Beatles happened.

            Jangly electric guitars. Ringo’s slap-dash on the drums. The matching suits, the Beatle boots, those innocent, devilish grins. And the faces melting off of every teenage girl in the audience. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was difficult to breath.

            A lot of things came to the surface in that moment, truths I’m still trying to process after all these years. But the clearest truth of all was this – that rock and roll was a community experience – it shattered who you were and dragged you dancing and twitching toward what you were becoming. And we were becoming together. It was tribal. What happened to that?

            Last night I was watching the director’s cut of Michael Wadleigh’s ground-breaking 1970 documentary Woodstock and it all came back – that sixties ethos of music as communal experience. But even more evident was the unmistakable quality of abandon. On the Ed Sullivan show the Beatles exhibited just enough recklessness to make the music seem dangerous and spontaneous, like they were discovering it right along with you. It was anything but canned. But five years later, at Woodstock, the undisciplined, frenzied side of rock and roll was starting to unravel. The performances at Woodstock were notoriously uneven. There were moments of transcendent magic, and if I’m being honest, puddles of pure mediocrity. Those fields weren’t the only things getting muddy. Too much Dionysus and not enough Apollo. Too many drugs and not enough sleep. Trusting the muse to carry you through your performance is one thing. But it helps if you can at least tune your guitar.

            But here’s what really struck me: no matter what was happening on stage, or not happening, the audience was into it 100%. No one had a cell phone – they hadn’t been invented yet. Everyone simply paid attention. To the bands and to each other. Over that three day weekend on Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York a remarkable community sprung from the soil like mushrooms after a spring rain. A community of presence and immediacy. And it was all shockingly uneventful, non-violent, and loving. People took care of each other. Because it’s the right thing to do. And because the music showed them how.

            But back to the abandon – a quality that poured off of every frame of the film, both on stage and off. The frenzied surrender of the music, the limitless faith that no matter how bad I stumble, I will be held aloft by the gods of rock and this band of merry-makers around me. It was almost frightening how raw and authentic the music was. This sense of abandon is a quality that has been completely sanitized out of all contemporary music, at great loss. Everything is so aseptically perfect now. In 1969 there were no click tracks, no tuners (let alone Auto-Tune), and very few effects pedals. It was just raw, primitive amplification and raw, uncaged talent, skittering on the edge of disaster. Nobody does that anymore. Everyone’s so careful. Everything’s so planned. Sure, the results were mixed. Some of the music was a little too rough. That’s what happens when you take chances and play naked without a safety net.

            In the planning stages, Creedence Clearwater Revival was the first big-name band that signed on. Then all the other big bands followed. Because of the reigning chaos CCR ended up playing at 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning. Who knows how it sounded. None of their music made it into the final edit of the film – notorious perfectionist John Fogerty wouldn’t allow it. Jefferson Airplane had so such qualms however, and forgive me Airplane fans, but it shows.

            Fast forward to today. So much has changed. All of the old streams through which music flowed into our lives have run dry. We used to learn about new bands and new songs on the radio, but radio’s abandoned that role. We used to line up at the record store to buy physical albums on the day they were released. Then we’d listen to them over and over in each other’s houses on giant stereos with huge speakers, dissecting every note, learning every lyric, and memorizing the liner notes. Then we’d argue about all of it all day at school. None of that happens anymore.

            Radio has been replaced by digital streaming and subscription services like YouTube, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and the rest. You build your own private playlists. We all walk around with our ear buds in, lost in our own little world. Music used to bring us together. Now it isolates us.   

Sure, people still go to concerts. But it feels different now. You’re either talking to the people around you, or videotaping the concert on your phone to show all of your social media friends that you’re at the concert without really being at the concert at all. How ironic.

            Every time I go hiking I come across people blaring music out of the tiny speakers on their phones – speakers the size of pencil erasers – music so crushed by compression and so diminished in its dynamic range that I’m pretty sure Marconi himself had higher audio quality on the first radio ever invented. We’re going backwards.

            Those of us who are recording artists are struggling to figure out how to position ourselves in this new reality.  Why record albums anymore? No one buys them. People who listen to my music do so through streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. I get paid pennies for those streams. I hear Apple is doing alright. The CEO of Spotify has a jet.

            It’s no one’s fault. Technology changes. We will always make music, we will always love music, and we will always need music. We’re just not sure how to connect all the dots anymore.

            Digitization, software, and hardware have taken over everything. And we’ve accepted it. Now, people pay top dollar to go to a “concert” where pre-recorded tracks are played over the PA and five or six rappers amble around on stage performing their spoken word pieces. When it’s good I actually love this stuff. But it’s hard to be spontaneous when you’re locked into a prerecorded track. Where’s the danger in that?

            Rock and roll needs to be dangerous. It needs to be bat-shit crazy. It needs to ooze sexuality. Even the practiced ribaldry of Cardi B seems tame – corporatized, commodified, and stripped clean of all its humanity, the essential element of all authentic sexual attraction. Say what you will about the sloppiness of the performances at Woodstock – you knew you were watching actual human beings doing amazing things in real time. You could feel it.   

            I don’t know where music’s headed next. It isn’t for me to say. But whatever it’s doing, and however it’s doing it, I’ll be listening.

Rock Star

Rock and roll’s been around for a long time. For young people, it’s the music of their grandparents. Yet its eternal coolness remains intact. The rock and roll sensibility keeps rearing its head in every new wave of music. Fashion and hair styles change. Aesthetic tastes evolve. But, as Huey Lewis sang, “the heart of rock and roll is still beating.”

The perennial allure of rock and roll speaks to its deeper nature. “Rock and roll” is no mere genre descriptor – it’s a whole attitude, a mode of consciousness, a way of life.

Mommies everywhere extol their toddlers with the accolade “you rock” for the triumphant accomplishment of not pooping in their pants. Nine year olds who bring home an A on their math test are crowned “rock stars.”  Sixteen year olds on their first job who successfully change out the oil in the deep fryer are praised by their bosses with a “rock on man, rock on.” On a literal level, continence, math skill, and proficiency in deep fryer maintenance seem utterly unrelated to the mesmerizing, hip-shaking shamanism of Jim Morrison, yet there it is. It makes sense. There’s something about rock and roll and rock stars that has come to stand for any human achievement involving risk, courage, and accomplishment. So what are we really saying when we call someone a rock star?

A rock star personifies courage. They are willing to risk everything to step out on stage and lead a hungry crowd on a Dionysian journey through the bowels of their own longing. A rock star has to overcome the natural proclivity of any artist for isolation. They don’t play it safe. They leap into the breach risking rejection, failure, or worse – the yawning chasm of their own irrelevance and ineffectiveness. They put themselves to the test and live with the consequences. Will their art move people, or move them toward the door?

A rock star is reckless. They engage in high risk backstage behaviors, they play dangerously loud, they jump off of scaffolds to crowd surf and act like they’re immortal. Some of them die young. They don’t seem terribly interested in longevity or prudence. Instead, what’s important is this moment, this experience, this feeling. Sure, it may not be smart. But we live vicariously through our rock stars and secretly revel in their revelry. They have the audacity to believe that no matter what, they’re going to be o.k.

A rock star is audacious, impudent even. In other words, they’re not terribly interested in respecting or conforming to your narrow definition of propriety. Their very existence is an affront to the polite sensibilities of the careful people in their Dockers and minivans. Rock stars cuss, spit, wear jeans to formal soirees and drink too much. Their hair is a mess. They have sex whenever, wherever, and with whomever they please. Like trickster gods they are hell bent on shattering every cultural norm and giving voice to every impulse on the human spectrum, licit and illicit. We disapprove of their excess just as we thrill at their abandon. In their freedom we feel our own limitlessness.

A rock star sacrifices themselves for the greater good. Like a hero in a classic myth, the rock star leaps into the abyss to wrestle with the demon. By their willingness to face their own death, we are all resurrected. On the surface, a rock star may seem the very portrait of self-obsession. But it’s all part of the act. They are playing a role. And in their play-acting, they model for us the quality of selfless service. Like any hero, they leave the known world with its well-defined boundaries and its value system rooted in safety and security, trading all this for the madness of the unknown. From the safety of our bounded universe we watch them careen into chaos, hungry for the catharsis their self-sacrifice will bring. Perhaps this is what we love most about our rock stars – their willingness to fully inhabit a role. In our work we too long to go big, to surrender to the fullest measure our responsibilities and tasks require of us. Yet we stay stuck in a careful utilitarian calculation of means and ends. Once, just once, we’d love to say what we really want to say, do what we really want to do, not out of self-interest but in the service of our larger role. We want to fight for what’s right and risk it all for the fullest realization of our aims. But instead we say yes ma’am, yes sir, and crank the Led Zepplin in our cars on the long commute home. It’s been a long time since we rock and rolled indeed.

A rock star is self-confident. They ask a lot of themselves, and they deliver. Through years of experience they come to learn an important fact about themselves – they know what to do and they know how to do it. They have what it takes. Self-confidence of this nature doesn’t have to brag or draw attention to itself – it’s evident in the work. There’s nothing to prove and no need to compete. A certain ease exudes from their every pore. An eerie calm fills the room when they walk in. Call it fearlessness, call it mastery, call it whatever you want. But it can’t be bought and it can’t be faked. You either have it or you don’t. The only way to get it is to earn it, then own it.

A rock star is focused. This isn’t always their most apparent feature. But beneath their Dionysian excess is a highly organized Apollonian process. To be a successful rock star you have to master marketing, business management, organizational dynamics, technology, logistics, and financial planning. Not to mention an unwavering work ethic. The work always comes first, often to the detriment of relationships, family, even one’s own well-being. Pushing through their own laziness the rock star does whatever it takes to achieve their aims.

A rock star is playful. Although they may be hard working business professionals, for them the line between work and play dissolved a long time ago. They are willing to laugh, especially at themselves, at a moment’s notice. This is all just one big stupid game, and they know it. They know they’re not in charge, and that luck and chance played an enormous role in their journey to the top. They keep themselves and everyone around them energized by slipping into playful silliness and light-hearted frivolity as often as possible. If you’re not having fun, something is very, very wrong.

But what’s perhaps most inspiring about rock stars, and the main reason we use the appellation “rock star” as our highest compliment, is their mysterious ability to integrate all of these disparate qualities into a unified whole. By bridging the dichotomies of intellect and intuition, focus and abandon, calculation and risk, assertion and surrender, wisdom and foolishness, mastery and immaturity, they perfectly champion and embody the qualities of art itself. They use their bodies, minds, and souls to channel our deepest, most unconscious dreams and bring them to the stage. In an opera both sublime and grotesque they turn the mysteries of the soul into public performance and mold our gravest fears and greatest hopes into transformative theater that washes over our senses, emboldens our hearts, ennobles our aspirations, and calls us to our highest purpose. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, each of us is the rock star of our own lives, and we have our rock stars to thank for breaking us open to that immutable truth.