Rock ‘n’ roll resurgence
David Zeke – inquisitive, artistic, analytical and vastly smarter than your average high school senior – is failing to find the irony here. So he adores the aged song that’s exploding from the speakers connected to his desktop computer. So what?
“It’s just really good music,” the 17-year-old from Vienna, Va. says with a shrug. This, as the snarling vocals come barreling out of the time-warp machine: “I’m not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation (Talkin’ ‘bout my generation)/ I’m just talkin’ ‘bout my g-g-generation (Talkin’ ‘bout my generation)!”
It’s The Who’s landmark youth anthem “My Generation,” recorded 40 years ago for a generation that has since turned gray, with adultly concerns and everything else that the song’s author, Pete Townshend, seemed to fear when he made that famous 1965 declaration, “Hope I die before I get old.”
Townshend was in his mid-40s when Zeke was born. The song itself already had reached the legal drinking age.
And yet, it’s Zeke’s music now. His buddies’, too, as classic rock has become their idiom of choice.
Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, there are indications that Zeke and his pals may be part of a broader trend – that “Light My Fire,” “Satisfaction,” “Hey Jude” and the rest of the classic-rock canon may be growing in popularity among teenagers who would otherwise be fawning over Franz Ferdinand, Bright Eyes and Kanye West.
The time-honored adolescent tradition of shaping an identity via music and fashion may well be leading an increasing number of kids to Woodstock and Winterland – not to mention Target, Urban Outfitters and J.C. Penney, where vintage classic-rock tees are selling in large quantities, according to spokeswomen from the three retailers.
“The kids are discovering the old music as their own way of being unique,” says Mike Engstrom, an executive at Rhino Records, which reissues and repackages oldies music. “It’s a personal definition.”
Meet the new rock, same as the old rock. (But not the old soul, alas, as the trend – if it can be called that – doesn’t extend to classic R&B. Even if old songs are frequently recast and recycled by contemporary hip-hop and soul artists, currency remains king in black pop, which long ago replaced rock-and-roll as the primary music of youth culture.)
“I love classic rock,” Zeke says. Never mind that it’s his parents’ music – and that, in general, teenagers living at home have always had a gag reflex when it comes to the culturalstuffs that bear the Ma and Pa Seal of Approval.
While rock fans have customarily undergone something of an archaeological period, it’s generally happened after going to college and/or moving out of the house, when generational differences begin to matter less. But the baby boomer soundtrack of the ‘60s and ‘70s has somehow stage-dived over the generation gap and is resonating with Zeke and other kids just like him.
Okay, maybe not just like him, given his extreme and proudly admitted level of classic-rock obsession, which has manifested itself thus: Zeke’s instant-messaging screen name is “LedZeppelin” followed by four digits, and he’s thinking about downloading Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” as his cell phone ringtone – if only he can peel himself away from the copy of Bob Dylan’s memoir, “Chronicles: Vol. 1,” that he’s absorbing.
His home computer, the one with the John Lennon pop-art image as the background screen, is brimming with thousands of carefully catalogued classic-rock songs, including every Pink Floyd album, plus the solo projects. “I have more songs than you’ll ever hear on the Arrow,” Zeke boasts, referring to Washington’s classic-rock radio station WARW-FM (94.7).
Last year, as a junior at the brain factory that is Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., Zeke and his friend Bryce Basques formalized their shared love of “Comfortably Numb” and “Whole Lotta Love” and “25 or 6 to 4” by starting the Classic Rock Appreciation Society.
The group meets every Friday, except during those weeks when paunchy, balding rock stars spring to life from the pages of the liner notes and stop by for visits: Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, in the area last month for a gig, came to the campus for a midweek chat about “one of the most awesomest bands of all time” (per Basques) and the meaning of “Aqualung.”
Jethro Tull?
“What’s next, Emerson, Lake and Palmer?” sneers Charles R. Cross, author of several noted rock biographies, including the new “Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix.” He adds: “But maybe the ultimate offense – the new, best way to offend your parents – is to listen to the music they were embarrassed to listen to. Like Jethro Tull. When it’s Hendrix or the Beatles or the Stones or the Who or Zeppelin, no parent is embarrassed that their kid likes that stuff.”
After Anderson’s chat and a brief, decidedly un-rock-and-roll flute recital, for instance, the Tull frontman was mobbed by wide-eyed students, many of them holding Tull CDs and cassettes and decades-old vinyl LPs. And no, the students insisted, they were not getting the autographs for their folks.
“I’m a classic-rock guy,” says John Jaskot, a 16-year-old Zeppelin-shirt-wearing junior whose CD copy of “Aqualung” bore Anderson’s loopy signature. “It all started in sixth grade, when my sister played ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (by Queen) for me, and I was like: Whoa! I started going through my dad’s CDs. Now I listen to Tull with him. My whole family does – including my brother, who’s 6.”
From there, though, they split, what with Pops having betrayed his classic-rock roots. “There was a time when our interests were perfectly aligned,” John says, “but he’s into country now.” Pshaw!
Says Cross: “Rarely do kids ever want to admit that their parents are right about anything. So it’s really surprising that kids are discovering this music as teenagers.”
Digital downloading, legal and otherwise, is among the keys to classic rock’s resurgence, as the oldies are now a mere mouse-click away.
The recent resurgence of guitar rock has also helped, as young music fans who like the White Stripes might be compelled to check out the band’s most obvious influences, such as Led Zeppelin – in basically the same way their parents might have discovered Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry via the Rolling Stones.
There’s also this: The ever-impatient and hyper-consolidated music industry doesn’t appear to be developing significant, sustainable mass-appeal artists the way it once did. Corporate radio’s ever-shrinking playlist and MTV’s wandering eye haven’t helped.
“This music is countercultural again,” says John McDermott, catalogue manager for the Hendrix estate. “Kids don’t think it’s their parents’ music; they just view it as cool music that’s not sold to them by MTV. And it’s not nostalgic, like something out of the ‘50s. It’s still fresh. Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix and the Doors – they’re generation-free to these kids.”
Says rock historian Dave Marsh: “If the merchants of mass marketing in the record business have a function, it must be to help create a vital mass culture in music. And it seems to me that they’ve failed. And they’ve failed badly.”
And now for the dissenting view, from Ahmet Ertegun, founding chairman of Atlantic Records, the lifelong home of Led Zeppelin. He acknowledges – and even applauds – a time-warp trend in rock. But Ertegun also says: “It always looks like the current crop isn’t up to the masters of the past. However, sometimes what we overlook in the current crop may emerge as masters of tomorrow. In their prime, Led Zeppelin was not considered a serious band by rock critics. The rock critics generally put them down as a passing fancy. It took time to realize that the music was of lasting value.”
“The music industry has turned into a factory that’s just churning out stuff,” says Zeke, who’s dismissive of most of the current crop. Some of it’s OK, he says, citing Bright Eyes and Wilco. He has Rage Against the Machine and Red Hot Chili Peppers posters on his bedroom wall, and Interpol and Yo La Tengo on his computer.
But the rest of it? Feh.
Emo? Lame-o! “We make fun of our friends who listen to that,” Zeke says of bands like Dashboard Confessional and early-model Jimmy Eat World.
Says John Sigman, a 17-year-old senior from McLean, Va. who serves as the classic rock club’s veep: “It’s just good music.”