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

by Steven Hyden

Of all the classic-rock documentaries that have been produced in the past decade, History of the Eagles is rivaled only by Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage as the best of the bunch. But whereas Beyond the Lighted Stage is a heartwarming story about lifelong friends who happen to be in the world’s biggest prog band, History of the Eagles is a much darker story about craven capitalists who labored for years over spotless, perfectly constructed pop-rock songs, and then played them forever on the road, even after they openly expressed their intense dislike for one another.

We learn that original bassist Randy Meisner was drummed out of the band because (according to Walsh) he “wasn’t alpha.”

exactly do we feel like we do? As I delved deeper into rock ’n’ roll lore, I learned that five rock shows seemed more important than the other tens of thousands of gigs played throughout time. These five shows were spoken about with such reverence that, in my mind, they took on the stature of religious rituals preordained with legendary status. These shows created narratives so deep and profound in rock history that they still influence the language we use to describe iconic live music moments.

Beatles are presented in their most caricatured form—heads bob, choruses “Woo!,” and the post-song bows are formal. The whole band seems stiff in the early going. The camera fixates on Paul (always the head-bobbiest Beatle) and Ringo, who can’t shake a wide, gawky grin

But the Beatles model—a four-piece rock band that writes and performs its own songs—is still predominant for rock artists. Which is why any time a band kills it on television, it is usually likened to a “Beatles on Ed Sullivan” moment. (For people of my generation, seeing Nirvana’s music video for “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV for the first time was a “Beatles on Ed Sullivan” moment.)

This moment is credited with changing the course of rock history. Countless documentaries have rehashed the same narrative about how Dylan merged the thoughtfulness of folk with the sound of rock ’n’ roll, forever changing both forms of music in the process.

But the real reason that Dylan at Newport matters in the context of our discussion of epochal concerts is because it established “don’t give the people what they want” as an artistic virtue in rock music. Before Dylan, there was a natural inclination for rock performers to please the audience. That’s what the Beatles did—they even played show tunes, for crying out loud, because show tunes were popular in the early sixties. But after Dylan, it suddenly became cool to do the opposite of what your audience might want at a live gig, because the opposite of what they want is what they might actually need.

Hendrix was also amazing to look at. He played guitar with his teeth, behind his back, with his crotch, with his amp, and finally with a can of lighter fluid and a match. For the mythically minded, Hendrix’s performance was a pornographic adaptation of the Christ story—mysterious birth, blessed life, violent death, and glorious resurrection. His musical influence on subsequent hard-rock and metal acts is incalculable, but his showmanship truly set him apart as a rock god. Any time a band blows shit up onstage, it’s a callback to Hendrix offering his guitar as a fiery sacrifice to the dark lords of rock.

But the music at these festivals is beside the point, which is why they sell out before the lineups are even announced. What people want is an excuse to get wasted in a field with their friends, just like the denizens of Woodstock back in ’69. The audience is always the top-billed star at any music festival.

Altamont is The Empire Strikes Back to Woodstock’s Star Wars—and we all know that Empire is better, right? I know it’s unseemly to frame Altamont—the designated “death of an era” moment for the sixties—as anything other than a tragedy. Because four people died, including Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old man who was stabbed to death by the Hells Angels. (Though four people also died at Woodstock.) Because sociopathic bikers were hired to work security. (Though those hippies messed with the Angels’ hogs.)

At the very least, Altamont is an excellent satire of Woodstock. What was bucolic at Woodstock—the flower children, the free acid, the piles of dung, promoter Michael Lang’s impish perpetual smirk—seemed grossly irresponsible and menacing at Altamont. It underscores the sheer luckiness of Woodstock; repeat a lawless, drug-fueled scenario ten times, and you’re going to get a lot more Altamonts than Woodstocks.

Stones’ bubble. But maybe Keith Richards is also right—the Stones cultivated an air of loosely supervised, “anything goes” anarchy at their shows throughout the sixties, and that has been the de facto rock-show vibe ever since. The best you can hope for at any gig is Altamont-like spontaneity where nobody happens to get killed.

(In Gimme Shelter, you can see somebody’s German shepherd pace back and forth in front of Jagger as he does his “Brothers and sisters, please cool out!” act to an increasingly unruly crowd.) I had heard the stories about yellow acid laced with strychnine that was handed out at Altamont by CIA agents tasked with discrediting the hippie movement, a conspiracy theory straight out of Thomas Pynchon. “Mick Jagger had long pretended to be the devil. Then one night he threw a party and the real devil showed up. The Stones have never recovered,” Rich Cohen writes in his 2016 book, The Sun and the Moon and the Rolling Stones, summing up the accepted Altamont narrative.

Now Aerosmith was celebrated for overcoming its decadent past and living the “right” way, a dominant narrative for reformed rock stars in the eighties. Bowie, Townshend, Jagger, Keith Richards—the biggest libertines of the sixties and seventies professed to be living clean and sober at this time.

What saved Get a Grip wasn’t rehab, however, but rather the other big secret to Aerosmith’s late-career success: outside songwriters. Getting clean was one thing, but using well-known fixers like Desmond Child (who cowrote “Dude (Looks Like a Lady)” and Diane Warren (who wrote all of 1998’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing,” Aerosmith’s only No. 1 hit) was a topic that the members of Aerosmith did not care to discuss publicly. But the band’s resolve to write songs without input from proven hit makers grew weaker after they signed a deal with Sony in 1991 worth $30 million, the most tangible spoils of their hard-won sobriety.

When decadence no longer had cachet, Aerosmith pivoted and thrived with a “clean” version of decadence in which money was the most powerful vice. As the biggest recovery addicts of all time, Aerosmith cooked sobriety on a spoon and injected it into their veins.

Notes on Track 10: From our misguided Satanic phase. We hoped that Satan would do for us what he did for Robert Johnson. Instead, we were depicted in an unfavorable light in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.

Any discussion regarding mystical rationalizations for bad behavior in rock ’n’ roll would be incomplete without Aleister Crowley, the most diabolical part-time mountaineer in the history of evil and an eternally corrupt influence on some of the biggest rock stars ever.

During Crowley’s lifetime—which somehow lasted seventy-two years, from the late nineteenth century to just after World War II—he was known as a writer, painter, magician, and occultist. He was a seeker who constantly sought out new and unusual experiences—the more taboo, the better. And then

But Crowley was also a nonconformist who galvanized other nonconformists, professing his belief that the only way for man to achieve his full potential was to live without moral or ethical constraints. Naturally, this way of life appealed to the long-haired hedonists who took over the music world twenty years after he died.

True Will is not something you can consciously discover, Crowley argued, but rather it must be revealed by eliminating all of the baggage—including psychological hang-ups, petty earthly conflicts, and conventional morality—that keeps individuals from communing with the universe. Only once those things have been set aside can a person realize the infinite power of the divine. Crowley’s method of realizing his own True Will was living a life of unchecked decadence.

Years before Jim Morrison was demanding blow jobs in recording booths for the good of his art—and not merely because he enjoyed blow jobs—Crowley lived in the gutter because he believed it was a “higher” form of existence. At least that was his ideology.

he needed people to be offended by what he was doing in order for his behavior to have any greater meaning. Without disapproving conservatives, his supposed religious code would have collapsed in on itself.

No rock star was as publicly devoted to Crowley as Jimmy Page. When Page bought Crowley’s infamous Boleskine House on Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, it was assumed that he was communicating with the damned in order to write Houses of the Holy deep cuts. How else was Led Zeppelin able to poorly mimic a reggae shuffle on “D’Yer Mak’er” and still have it come out sounding awesome? Robert Plant was a great front man, but Jimmy’s true copilot had to be Satan. “I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century,” Page said in 1978. “Because his whole thing was liberation of the person, of the entity, and that restrictions would foul you up, lead to frustration which leads to violence, crime, mental breakdown, depending on what sort of makeup you have underneath. The further this age we’re in now gets into technology and alienation, a lot of the points he’s made seem to manifest themselves all down the line.”

“Mr. Crowley” is notable in Ozzy’s canon for two reasons: It was the first and last time that Ozzy used the word “polemically” in a song. “Mr. Crowley” seemed to imply that Ozzy was into worshipping Satan.

“Mr. Crowley” wasn’t really pro–Satan worship, insisted Bob Daisley, Ozzy’s longtime bassist and the song’s lyricist. “It was about standing back and looking at someone like Aleister Crowley and saying, ‘What sort of life is that?’”

can’t say if “Mr. Crowley” sounded menacing in ’81, but it’s the opposite of menacing now. The instrumental fanfare that opens the song—a schlocky church organ riff that emits “spooky” synth swooshes ripped off from the Halloween soundtrack—is as terrifying as plastic vampire teeth. Nevertheless, fearing Ozzy Osbourne was customary for middle Americans also dreading the onset of phony Satanism in every other corner of eighties suburbia, from Dungeons and Dragons to the Eagles’ “Hotel California” to supposedly pro-Lucifer messages imprinted on Styx (!) and Electric Light Orchestra (!!) records. “Mr. Crowley” fed into that fear.

By the time Ozzy was fired from Sabbath in 1979, he was viewed by his bandmates as a slobbering buffoon who couldn’t be relied upon, even given the band’s lax “slobbering buffoon” standards. (According to Wall’s Symptom of the Universe, the final straw came when the band discovered Ozzy passed out in the studio, sleeping in a pool of his own piss.) Black Sabbath replaced Ozzy with the diminutive Ronnie James Dio, who actually looked like Satan, if Queens were a borough of Hades. Dio later pioneered the iconic “devil horns” hand sign known to metalheads everywhere, a fact that Dio pointed out in pretty much every interview he ever conducted until his death in 2010.

On early solo albums like Blizzard of Ozz and 1981’s Diary of a Madman, Ozzy dabbled in cartoon devil worship over the neoclassical guitar wizardry of Randy Rhoads. It was like Van Halen for guys who hated seeing girls at Van Halen concerts. Ozzy even dyed his hair that David Lee Roth shade of blond, but he otherwise kept himself ugly for street-cred purposes.

Flash forward another ten years, and Ozzy had pivoted to another new guise. Ozzy was now the imbecilic patriarch of The Osbournes—perpetually confused, mentally compromised, and shaking with apparent post-addiction tremors, the Prince of Darkness was reduced to calling out for Sharon like a helpless child stranded in a high chair whenever he couldn’t work the remote control. This version of Ozzy was born many years earlier, in Penelope Spheeris’s monumental 1988 documentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, in which Ozzy is interviewed in his bathrobe as he makes breakfast.

On The Osbournes, this self-awareness curdled into Ozzy’s making himself the semiwitting butt of the joke. The Osbournes played like a potty-mouthed PSA: this is what happens in the aftermath of abusing cocaine, fucking Demerol, morphine, and everything else back in the seventies.

Ozzy Osbourne allowed himself to be cast as the ultimate rock ’n’ roll casualty because, as a show business lifer, he must have known that debasement was what the job now required.

Of course, only other bass players go to Black Sabbath concerts to stare at Geezer Butler. The main attractions are Ozzy and Iommi, the dark underbelly of the singer-guitarist dynamic typified by Mick & Keith and Plant & Page. Iommi bullied Ozzy as a kid, and then bullied him some more once they reconnected—not as grown-ups, just when they were older—during Sabbath’s prime back in the seventies. But then the power balance shifted once Ozzy’s fame as a solo artist eclipsed that of the band that had fired him. Now the value of the brand depended largely on whether revisiting Sabbath was convenient or advantageous for Ozzy.

Back when Sabbath was at full strength in the seventies, they never got any respect. “Like Cream, but worse!” was Lester Bangs’s assessment, and he was more inclined than most rock critics to appreciate Black Sabbath.

What offended the first wave of rock critics was that Black Sabbath seemed to have no political consciousness. Sabbath was among the bands blamed for reducing the utopian idealism of the sixties down to mindless parking-lot hedonism. Even Aleister Crowley had an ethos—the kids who toked up to “Sweet Leaf” didn’t seem to believe in anything. That this criticism of Sabbath ignores “War Pigs”—surely one of the three or four greatest antiwar songs in rock history—is beside the point. Black Sabbath did have a political consciousness, but that’s not what makes it great or important. Black Sabbath is great precisely because it transcends transient stuff such as politics. Vol. 4 will never be tied to a particular year or ideology or set of passing trends. You put it on and it just sounds like rock ’n’ roll. And to me, rock ’n’ roll has always been the clearest path to a higher power. Sex and drugs are amazing, but they’ll only get you so far. Sex and drugs signify something else to me now than they did when I was nineteen. But Vol. 4 feels exactly the same.

But once you’re older, and the buzz of sin wears off, the pursuit of being alive starts to matter more than the prizes you spend most of your life chasing.

Jagger wasn’t interested in taking a sad song and making it better. He was saying that a sad song might be what we deserve.

The politics of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is what most interested rock’s early historians. From the beginning, Jagger’s bedroom song was viewed as a definitive statement on the failures of his generation to carry forth a revolution. “This era and the collapse of its bright and flimsy liberation are what the Stones leave behind with the last song of Let It Bleed,” Greil Marcus wrote in Rolling Stone when the album was released. “The dreams of having it all are gone, and the album ends with a song about compromises with what you want—learning to take what you can get, because the rules have changed with the death of the ’60s.”

Jagger didn’t bother to distinguish a specific audience or point out exactly what “they” might want but couldn’t have. For him, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” means whatever they say it means.

Pundits rapidly pointed out the irony of Trump’s utilizing a classic-rock song long associated with the sixties counterculture. But classic rock was already established as the soundtrack for the Republican National Convention—the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was the favored local attraction that week for attendees, and a guitar was even integrated into the convention’s official logo. Weren’t these people paying attention to the lyrics to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”? Did they know nothing about the context from which this Rolling Stones classic sprung?

Although “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” could be interpreted as an unflattering song about Trump supporters, who from the outside resembled an unruly mob of petulant screamers refusing to take responsibility for their own problems, I suspect that Trump’s explanation can also be taken at face value: he likes Mick Jagger, and he likes “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” And the people who voted for Trump probably like that song, too.

When you’re surrounded only by white people in their sixties and seventies, you can almost imagine that the world you associate with “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is still attainable. For this audience, the song is no longer a salve for those disillusioned by the dawn of Nixon but a taunt to liberals who want to welcome Mexicans into our country and make health insurance accessible to those who can’t afford it. No, you really can’t get what you want, liberal snowflakes. Mick Jagger told us so.

But on the classic-rock station—with the exception of Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy—there were no black artists. This patently exclusionary narrative was drilled into my consciousness before I was smart enough to question it. It had little to do with music and almost everything to do with the biases of gatekeepers. The story of classic rock as told by decades of radio airplay, magazine profiles, and rock books is a saga about white guys, because all other kinds of people have typically been rerouted to other genres, even when they were making rock music.

University sociology professor Deena Weinstein observed that metal fans tend to be white males who are drawn together out of a sense of tribalism that affirms their identity. Outsiders are welcomed so long as they follow the group’s “codes of dress, appearance, and behavior, and show devotion to the music,” she writes. “Neither sexist, ageist, nor racist on principle, the metal subculture is exclusivist, insistent upon upholding the codes of its core membership.”

Let’s conduct a thought experiment: is it possible to write a history of rock using only black artists? You could start with Ike Turner, whose 1951 song “Rocket 88” is sometimes credited as the first rock song. Then, of course, there’s Chuck Berry, ace guitarist and one of rock’s most important singer-songwriters. And Little Richard, the model for all future rock ’n’ roll screamers, eccentrics, and gender-benders. All of these artists are already identified as rockers, so let’s branch out. Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, and Jimmy Reed played a pivotal role in influencing how rock is sung, performed, and conceptualized. If they were white, they would automatically be classified as rock stars, but because they’re black, they are more commonly regarded as blues and soul artists. So, let’s annex them into rock history, because they belong there, too. In the sixties, you have all of the great stars of Motown and Stax, including Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and Wilson Pickett, as well as iconoclasts like James Brown, Sly Stone, and the greatest guitarist of all time himself, Jimi Hendrix. Only Hendrix is commonly categorized as rock, but all those artists either influenced rock musicians or sound exactly like the rock bands of their era.

I’m not arguing that the Supremes and Al Green should be thought of as rock rather than soul artists. I’m just suggesting that there’s nothing intrinsic about genre. It’s a system created by humans who want to make sense of what they’re hearing. Ultimately, it’s as much about the perception of the listener as it is about the work of the artist.

But just because you’ve found your own place doesn’t mean someone very different from you can’t find a place inside the same one. If these differences can’t always be reconciled, we should at least recognize that other perspectives can coexist under the same tent.

You can probably guess what happened next: The drunken yahoos weren’t satisfied with just incinerating dance music. After Dahl’s explosive routine was over, more than five thousand maniacs stormed the field. Bases were ripped out of the ground and the batting cage was wrecked. A guy even tried to set fire to one of the foul poles. A half hour later, the SWAT team was called in, and thirty-nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct. Comiskey was in such rough shape that the White Sox had to forfeit the second game.

In the aftermath of Disco Demolition Night, two opposing narratives emerged. In the first, the event was viewed as a sign that disco had reached peak saturation, inspiring a backlash. Disco was undeniably the signature sound of pop music in 1979.

But by the early eighties, “disco” was a dirty word—though this was another instance where categorization overshadowed music. Dance music never stopped being popular, it just continued under a different name.