4 Lessons on How to Rock ‘n Roll in 2017
If you’re anything like me, you’re tired of hearing people moan about 2016. Trump, Brexit, George Michael – these things have very little impact on people’s day to day lives. Leave all that behind this year, lay a record down, and learn from last century’s greatest art form.
When I was growing up in the early ‘90s, grunge music was all the rage. Bands were all copying Nirvana – wearing cardigans, shorts, and generally moping about while singing loud and boring songs.
Somehow I managed to hear music from an earlier age that grabbed my attention and sent me off on another direction.
In my early teens I bought Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Greatest Hits’ album, put ‘Dancing in the Dark’, ‘Thunder Road’, and ‘Badlands’ on loud on my hi-fi, and somehow knew I was connecting to something deeper than the nihilist youth culture of our postmodern age.
What I heard in the Boss’s music was rock that had a roll – a type of music that had its roots in the blues and gospel; that drew a golden thread from Elvis to Roy Orbison to the Rolling Stones; and that spoke to something deeper than angst, something more along the lines of joy, freedom, and redemption.
To my mind these are ideas we need every year.
And as I wrote in my piece on punk rockers , musicians and artists are meant to take us out of our day to day grind and to recognise the absolutes of what it means to be human, the part of us which transcends the bureaucracy and petty moralism of politically correct life in the modern western world.
So, to push onwards and upwards into this year, I offer four lessons from four of the greats of 20th century rock ‘n roll.
1. Keith Richards – There is Only One Song
Keith Richards is the soul of the Rolling Stones. Obviously you should steer pretty clear of his lifestyle. But when it comes to his music philosophy this guy knows what it is all about. He tells musicians not to bother with the guitar if they know nothing of the blues, and even berates the Beatles for being soulless.
Instead, he says, “There is only one song, and Adam and Eve wrote it; the rest is a variation on a theme.”
He understands his life’s work to be a part of a tradition, and in this way, he finds originality.
He is also unique among guitarists in that he describes himself as a rhythm guitarist, not a lead. He doesn’t overkill the song with unnecessary sound – he plays the notes, and allows the gaps between to be filled with resonance:
“A painter’s got a canvas. The writer’s got reams of empty paper. A musician has silence.”
Listen to Richards on the Rolling Stones’ ‘Shine a Light’. It doesn’t get much better.
2. Eric Clapton – Living on Your Knees
I recently read Clapton’s autobiography and was surprised to note just how candid he is about his personal brokenness.
He never knew his father, believed his mother to have been his elder sister while growing up under the care of his grandparents, had a young son die in tragic circumstances, and suffered and beat severe addiction issues.
He wrote this of the period in his life just before he came through his alcoholism:
“It was like a moment of clarity when I saw the absolute squalidness of my life at that
moment. I began to write a song called ‘Holy Mother’, in which I asked for help from a divine source, a female that I couldn’t even begin to identify. I still love that song, because I recognize that it came from deep in my heart as a sincere cry for help.”
Here’s the song, performed with Pavarotti (and is the blue guitar a nod to the real Holy Mother?).
Eventually Clapton would turn his life around – literally in a moment – in a similar spiritual experience. He was coming to the end of his second stint in rehab and was suddenly filled with terror at the realisation his life may never change:
“In the privacy of my room, I begged for help. I had no notion who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether … and, getting down on my knees, I surrendered. Within a few days I realized that … I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in. From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night, to express gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray, and with my ego, this is the most I can do. If you are asking why I do all this, I will tell you … because it works, as simple as that.”
3. Leonard Cohen – There’s a Crack in Everything – It’s How the Light Gets In
If you were going to mourn only one celebrity death this year, Leonard’s your man.
Sure, he is not rock ‘n roll in the strict sense. He is folk and blues. But like Richards, he understands that great music deals in myth, and myth is what sustains us as we make our way through the valleys of life.
“…we've forgotten the central myth of our culture which is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This situation does not admit of solution of perfection. This is not the place where you make things perfect, neither in your marriage, nor in your work, nor anything, nor your love of God, nor your love of family or country. The thing is imperfect. And worse, there is a crack in everything that you can put together, physical objects, mental objects, constructions of any kind. But that's where the light gets in, and that's where the resurrection is and that's where the return, that's where the repentance is. It is with the confrontation, with the brokenness of things.”
Not a bad lesson for all the puritans cluttering up your Facebook feed with all their political angst.
For my money, lyrics don’t get much better than what he growls in his most famous work, ‘Hallelujah’:
“And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.”
That is probably the core lessons of rock ‘n roll. It is no coincidence that both Cohen and Richards speak of Adam and Eve. Humanity has one song – redemption. We’re not in paradise anymore, but somehow we still have hope, still have, as Springsteen sang, ‘Reason to Believe’.
4. Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen – Art is Love
An excerpt from Springsteen’s eulogy for bandmate Dan Federici:
“Of course we all grow up and we know ‘it's only rock and roll’...but it's not. After a lifetime of watching a man perform his miracle for you, night after night, it feels an awful lot like love.”
When I watched the E Street Band in Soweto, Bruce finished the night, in the midst of drenching rain, by telling us to remember that the E Street Band loves us. The miracle of the night was that we believed him.
Springsteen’s genius is that he recognises a rock ‘n roll band is ultimately alchemy – it’s magic, a sum greater than its parts, which reaches out to an audience in some kind of wave of recognition and sonic communion.
Listen to ‘Blood Brothers’ – a lesser known ballad.
Here’s to the Year of our Lord, anno Domini, 2017.
Find the magic. Find the roll.
And remember, this blog loves you.
Chris.
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