Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

by Steven Hyden

Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, the Stones, Dylan, Springsteen, Neil Young, the Who, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, David Bowie—the fixtures of my classic-rock youth. But like all precious minerals, classic rock is a finite resource. One day, it will disappear. Bands break up. Albums go unplayed and are eventually forgotten. Legends die. But it still seems . . . unfathomable. For much of my life, I thought that classic rock would be around forever.

Loving classic rock has always been an act of faith: albums as sacred texts, live concerts as quasireligious rituals, and rock mythology as a means of self-discovery.

I’m not a religious person, but if there is a God, I was sure I had found Him on side two of Abbey Road.

The days of forcing the audience to listen to three or four songs from a well-intentioned but mostly lousy late-career album nobody cares about are basically over; time is precious, and classic-rock tours now are all about the hits.

And then there was Daltrey, who I estimated had lost at least 75 percent of his once-mighty singing voice. When he tried to scream his iconic yelp at the climax of “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” he sounded like granddad hacking the gunk out of his throat.

It was a metaphor for what I’d been doing to my favorite classic-rock bands for years. I had let my imagination trick me into believing that classic rock would be forever vital and strong. But when you look away from the myth, what you find are wizened senior citizens who don’t have a lot of time left.

When that happens, will there be a new generation of disciples who take up the cause for classic rock and carry it forward? Or is classic rock itself now a problematic relic from a time when white male musicians commanded a disproportionate amount of attention? Does it deserve to fade away?

As for the people who were born into the streaming age, they don’t know what they have. The miraculous is now mundane. “Everything” has always been possible, so it sort of feels like nothing.

But exposure to tightly regimented radio formats had already programmed my brain to think about music in a certain way, starting with the belief that there really was such a thing as “classic rock.”

Classic rock didn’t exist as a genre until the early 1980s, when stations in middle-American cities like Cleveland and Houston that had once aspired to a progressive mix of new music and obscure album cuts began relying on the same old familiar songs by the most famous and successful bands of the sixties and seventies.

But that wasn’t really the case: radio had codified a generation of bands—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac—as “classic” because it was convenient marketing.

Billy Joel, the Rolling Stones, and AC/DC were still producing successful radio singles (from Storm Front, Steel Wheels, and The Razors Edge, respectively) and MTV played their latest videos, which in retrospect was a bad idea for MTV as well as the artists. Looking back, Billy Joel setting fire to photos of Lee Harvey Oswald and Oliver North in the “We Didn’t Start the Fire” video didn’t help him or the music channel seem any cooler. New albums by Bruce Springsteen, Don Henley, Phil Collins, and Sting were similarly relevant, if not exactly hip. Van Halen’s first record of the nineties, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge, debuted at No. 1, and the LP’s signature single, “Right Now,” spawned a clip that won Video of the Year at the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards, the same year that Krist Novoselic smashed himself in the face with his own bass guitar during Nirvana’s instant-classic performance of “Lithium.”

the world at the time, an appreciation of classic rock was inevitably baked in. Many grunge bands made this connection explicit: Nirvana covered David Bowie on MTV Unplugged in New York. Pearl Jam made a whole album with Neil Young. Alice in Chains hired Ozzy Osbourne’s ex–bass player. With grunge bands, there was always a sense of perpetuation—they didn’t seek to kill classic rock, as the punks supposedly set out to do. (Though in the end, bands like the Clash, the Ramones, and Talking Heads wound up absorbed into classic-rock history anyway.) Grunge bands wanted to carry the torch, and in the process integrate themselves into a larger, ongoing story.

In my town, REO Speedwagon and Journey never went away like they did in more urban parts of the country. I’d been to enough car washes and county fairs in my life to know their hyperemotive hits by heart, along with the most spun tunes by the likes of Boston, Styx, Kansas, and Supertramp.

Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly are as classic as “classic rock” gets, but WAPL never played those artists, as they were considered oldies and thus segregated from the likes of Rush and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

had already read enough rock criticism to be aware of the Velvet Underground, but it was difficult to actually hear any of Lou Reed’s seminal gutter poetry on local radio, because WAPL preferred to play Grand Funk Railroad. Ditto for the leading lights of punk and new wave—I couldn’t hear the Ramones, Elvis Costello, or Talking Heads because local radio stuck to the Cars, Kansas, and Chicago.

Was my childhood love of classic rock really just an outgrowth of having limited listening options on the radio? Does this fully explain my continued interest in this topic over the course of more than two-thirds of my life? Not really. And I know this because of Joseph Campbell.

Campbell believed myths serve a universal purpose, acting as a through-line in the history of humankind from the earliest societies right up to the present day. He viewed myths as “themes of the imagination,” borne in the collective unconscious and “moved by its own inward experiences . . . that are asking for fulfillment.”

“A hero properly is someone who has given his life to something bigger than himself or other than himself,” Campbell said. This process of giving yourself to something bigger usually involves a physical quest, like a war or an act of heroism. But it can also be a spiritual journey, in which a person “has learned or found a mode of experiencing the supernormal range of human spiritual life, and then come back and communicated it.”

After studying the ins and outs of classic-rock radio in my bedroom, I deduced that two albums were greater than the rest—Led Zeppelin’s IV and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. So those were the tapes that I asked my brother, Paul, to buy me for my fourteenth birthday.

But Zeppelin’s fourth was also known as Untitled, Runes, ZoSo, or Symbols, as each member of Zeppelin was signified by an enigmatic emblem on the album sleeve.

The other law is that Led Zeppelin IV is too popular to be your favorite Zeppelin album; this is why rock critics who try too hard always make a case for In Through the Out Door being Zeppelin’s best.

“When the Levee Breaks” is strictly lights-out material, conjuring the feral sound of pure sexual and spiritual foreboding. Never in recorded history has the loaded phrase “going down,” which Plant moans over and over in the song’s final moments, seemed so seductive and terrifying.

All three surviving members of Led Zeppelin swiftly (and unsurprisingly) denounced Hammer of the Gods upon publication. Jimmy Page claimed that he literally threw the book out the window of his house, which I assume was a castle perched on some distant mountaintop.

also learned about other important tidbits of rock mythology from Davis: Robert Johnson’s fateful deal with the devil for his own musical immortality at “the crossroads” back in the 1930s; the evil magnetism of early-twentieth-century writer Aleister Crowley, the self-proclaimed “wickedest man in the world,” who inspired Jimmy Page as well as Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and the members of Black Sabbath; and the mind-warping powers of “backward-masking” evil subliminal messages into rock songs.

According to legend, if you played a vinyl version of Led Zeppelin IV backward on a turntable, you would hear “Hail to my sweet Satan” buried inside the otherwise beatific mix of “Stairway to Heaven.”

Let’s go back to Joseph Campbell’s definition of a mythological hero and the motif of a quest. The members of Led Zeppelin went on a physical quest. I understand that some readers might be offended by equating the guys in Led Zeppelin banging nubile members of the infamous L.A. groupie cabal the GTOs at the Continental Hyatt House with acts of heroism. It’s undoubtedly true that the drugging and whoring lifestyle that Zeppelin epitomized is emblematic of the questionable white-male fantasies that have long animated interest in classic rock while also stultifying its ability to evolve with the rest of the culture.

Pink Floyd’s vision quest on The Dark Side of the Moon, meanwhile, was much different. Zeppelin’s music went outward, whereas Dark Side was directed inward. Preoccupied with alienation, clinical depression, man’s inhumanity to man, and the possibility of losing your damn mind at any moment, Pink Floyd deployed outer space as a metaphor for the vastness of inner space. And inner space is where teenagers spend the majority of their time.

It’s like Pink Floyd was trying to be as boring as possible while also being insanely popular.

Led Zeppelin represented an ideal of what I wished I could be, but Pink Floyd depicted what I actually was—gloomy.

In the end, the most moving parts of The Dark Side of the Moon explore the (frankly terrifying) likelihood that the inside of your own skull both is inescapable and might in fact be the worst place to be—this never seems truer than when you’re just starting puberty.

the core of Pink Floyd’s mythology is the band’s original front man, Syd Barrett, a handsome, charismatic singer-songwriter whose mental health rapidly deteriorated right as the Floyd released its 1967 debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. While Barrett reportedly suffered from schizophrenia, it was his experimentation with psychedelics that made him a mythological figure among Floyd fans.

Pink Floyd’s most popular work subsequently drew on the power of what Barrett signified; even after he was no longer in the band, his spirit haunted its records. Dark Side’s most pivotal track, “Brain Damage,” is a song about reconciling insanity. (“There’s someone in my head / But it’s not me.”) Pink Floyd’s next album, Wish You Were Here, is a more overt tribute to Pink Floyd’s “crazy diamond.” (A disheveled Barrett actually paid the Floyd a visit during the Wish You Were Here sessions. He looked so bonkers, his former bandmates didn’t recognize him.) The last of Pink Floyd’s “Syd” trilogy, The Wall, is a concept album about a fragile rock star who is driven to hide behind a mental barrier that he must ultimately transcend.

For Barrett, there would be no transcendence, at least not in his personal life. As an archetype, however, Barrett will probably live forever. (He shed this mortal coil in 2006.) He is the defining example of one of the more enduring rock myths, the Romantically Damaged Loner Genius Recluse. This is an artist who is supposedly so brilliant that he is rendered tragically fragile, forcing him to retreat from the outside world.

Barrett’s story is informed by a bit of both scenarios. Like all myths, the Loner Genius Recluse narrative requires the audience to do most of the work via their imaginations. It’s what the genius didn’t do that will forever seem most enticing.

was one thing to follow pop music as it unfolded in real time—that just felt empty in comparison, as ephemeral as yesterday’s papers. But classic rock told ancient fables about the highs and lows of success, the excitement and danger of sex, the intoxication and degradation of drugs, and the myriad paths to enlightenment and eternal damnation. It was an awe-inspiring universe loaded with stories that had a beginning, middle, and end, just waiting to be explored.

The result of Napster and YouTube is that classic rock as we know it no longer exists. There are still great rock bands, and there are still rock bands that are part of the classic-rock continuum, in that they are influenced by classic-rock bands and they are carrying those traditions forward. However, these post-classic-rock bands—the White Stripes, the Killers, Arcade Fire, the National, and the War on Drugs are notable examples—don’t have the cultural impact of classic-rock bands, and they never will.

Today, the best new bands have virtually no shot at exposure via radio, which is still vitally important for breaking new artists. Meanwhile, the record industry has reverted to a pop-centric focus—as it always does—as a reaction to a prolonged economic downturn.

Classic-rock bands sell millions of records, play huge concerts, and have four to six songs that everybody knows. The last decade to produce bands like that is the nineties, which is why Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Smashing Pumpkins tracks now get played on classic-rock stations along with Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.

Here’s what The Fragile wasn’t: an album that was well served by being chopped into stray tracks that are sampled for ten seconds on Napster before being discarded forever.

After The Fragile, there would be plenty of classic rock records. But classic rock records were now extinct.

But the Who don’t quite fit the bill as a defining classic rock band, as Pete Townshend’s preoccupation with rock operas makes the Who too iconoclastic to be truly emblematic of anything other than themselves.

All of my other favorite classic-rock bands are disqualified on similar grounds. Led Zeppelin set the template for how rock bands are supposed to sound onstage and screw around backstage, but how many bands have pulled off that wholly unique Zeppelin mystique?

Pink Floyd is the ultimate “head” band, but Roger Waters used arena rock to critique arena rock, so it seems odd to make his band the figurehead of a genre that he sort of hates. Queen is the gold standard for rock showma...

Bruce Springsteen? He’s a little too pure to signify the dark, seedy side of classic rock. Black Sabbath? They’re a little too evil to represent classic rock’s earnestness. The Beatles or Rolling Stones? Possibly, though again, those bands have their own vast, rich mythologies.

No, there’s only one band that fits the bill as classic rock’s defining band. My heart doesn’t want it to be this band, but my head confirms that there’s no other choice. The evidence, I’m afraid, points solidly down a dark desert highway, where cool winds blow back your hair. Of course I’m referring to the (fucking) Eagles.

The Eagles were the most popular American rock band on the planet between 1972 and 1980. Early on, they were known for easygoing country-rock tunes about loose women from Winslow, Arizona, and loose women who are also liars from Los Angeles, California. These songs are collected on the 1976 compilation Their Greatest Hits (1971–75), the bestselling album of the twentieth century, and the second-biggest seller overall, trailing only Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

The numbers suggest that the average person is more likely to love the Eagles than hate them. And yet everyone I know who cares about classic rock despises the Eagles. There are many reasons for this, starting with the Eagles’ dubious credentials as a rock band. “Take It Easy,” “Witchy Woman,” “Desperado,” “Peaceful Easy Feeling”—this is not the résumé of a band that knows how to rock.

Henley and Frey were never cool in the way that Jimmy Page was cool. They were cool like the captain of the high school baseball team is cool. They were clean-cut, hardworking jocks, the kind of guys who will tape your ass cheeks together if you dare pass out early at the party. (The influence of The Big Lebowski also can’t be discounted in spreading the epidemic of Eagles hate. It’s sort of impossible to talk about the Eagles now without acknowledging how the Dude hates the fucking Eagles, man. In terms of classic-rock theory, Jeffrey Lebowski ranks among the most influential music critics of the past twenty years.)

Above all, the Eagles are stymied by the old truism about familiarity breeding contempt. As recently as 2014, Nielsen SoundScan reported that American radio stations were still playing “Hotel California” once every eleven minutes.