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Frampton Comes Alive! became a mainstay of seventies suburbia, the classic-rock equivalent of the station wagon or backyard trampoline.
Critiquing the Beatles’ performance on Ed Sullivan is like hiring a copy editor to do a once-over on the Declaration of Independence. Supreme historical significance obliterates any petty nitpicking.
Dylan decided to perform with a backing band at the world’s most famous folk-music festival, where Dylan had performed annually since 1963 to great acclaim. But when Dylan rocked, people got mad and booed.
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.
the opposite of what they want is what they might actually need.
after Monterey, Hendrix became one of the top rock stars of all time.
beyond every other guitarist, he was also a pioneer of guitar technology.
His musical influence on subsequent hard-rock and metal acts is incalculable, but his showmanship truly set him apart as a rock god.
Woodstock stands as the defining example of an idealized communal experience at a massive rock show. It matters because it was the first big concert where the audience mattered more than the artists,
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.
Gimme Shelter is the most terrifying rock documentary ever made, a reminder that a rock show can devolve into chaos and actual life-or-death peril.
Springsteen’s aversion to drugs and alcohol, along with the other self-destructive trappings of rock stardom, kept him insanely well preserved as he entered middle age.
Mixed messages are the lingua franca of classic rock—it’s
The most contradictory classic-rock trope is the “life on the road” song.
Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, the best “life on the road” album in the classic-rock canon, because it was actually recorded onstage, backstage, in hotel rooms, and on the tour bus.
Conceptually, the “life on the road” song is supposed to present an authentic (i.e., depressing) depiction of rock stardom as a series of occupational hazards.
except “life on the road” songs in fact do the opposite of discouraging future rock lifers.
“life on the road” songs make life on the road seem like a hero’s journey.
The sort of quests described in a “life on the road” song might seem insurmountable, but they clearly were surmounted, or else these people wouldn’t have become famous enough for the rest of us to hear this song.
The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s classic 1978 documentary about a farewell concert performed by the Band and a supporting cast of iconic rock legends
Part of loving classic rock is regarding the road as a fearsome yet romantic metaphor for living a life of absolute freedom outside of normal society—precisely
We want our heroes on the stretch of concrete, enduring one blackout night and hungover morning after another, because it enables us to witness the very extremes of human existence from a safe vantage point.
like Robert Johnson forty years earlier, the Allman Brothers Band appeared to have struck a Faustian bargain for its success.
In the iconography of the Allmans, the road is a place where you try to make a livin’ and do the best you can, and a symbol for the grind of human existence amid omnipresent hardship.
In a different time, living a decadent lifestyle truly was viewed as a “deep statement about America.” It meant you were an outlaw challenging the morality and social mores of the establishment. But we no longer live in a world where people will just understand intuitively that a character like Richie is heroic and not merely an asshole.
Sugerman’s book captures a crucial part of the Doors’ appeal: it is a big-brother band for naïve teenagers curious about the scariest and most alluring parts of adulthood.
But the greatest rehab story of all was Aerosmith.
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.
Any discussion regarding mystical rationalizations for bad behavior in rock ’n’ roll would be incomplete without Aleister Crowley,
Crowley’s self-importance derived from the belief that his behavior was an affront to mainstream moralists. Like so many rock stars after him, 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.
Incredibly, Osbourne went from being fired from Black Sabbath for being a pee-stained screw-up, to the most enduring superstar in the history of metal.
From the eighties onward, Ozzy Osbourne always found a way to adapt to whatever the changing times demanded of him.
for the most part, Ozzy is funny and smart in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II—a proud survivor comfortable in his own skin as a self-aware cautionary tale.
On The Osbournes, this self-awareness curdled into Ozzy’s making himself the semiwitting butt of the joke.
Everything that had once been sexy and dangerous (but in a good way) about rock ’n’ roll was now viewed as simply destructive and sort of funny. 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.
What offended the first wave of rock critics was that Black Sabbath seemed to have no political consciousness.
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. You see that you’re on the same road as your ancestors, and your offspring are following you.
The experience of discovering an artist after he’s built a body of work is much different than following an artist as that work is created in real time.
if you come to an artist later, after all that music was released and initially assessed, the perspective often skews away from hits, which seem overfamiliar, and toward the lesser-heralded gems, which are fresher.
a good “bad” record, which is a record that you talk yourself into loving after you’ve grown tired of all the acknowledged masterpieces and respected second-tier releases in a legendary artist’s discography.
This is the first phase of the good “bad” album experience: completism.
This is the second phase of the good “bad” album experience: grudging appreciation.
Herein lies the third phase of the good “bad” album experience: brainwashing.
The eighties in general were a rough time for the stars of sixties and seventies rock. For aging artists who had defined their era by constantly innovating, the eighties represented the inevitable point when technology and fashion finally surpassed them.
The conundrum for classic rockers in the eighties was that rock stars had never been so old before.
a lack of sentimentality regarding changing membership has been required to keep many of the biggest bands in classic rock afloat.
What makes AC/DC unique in rock history is this disciplined uniformity.
Axl/DC was indicative of late-stage classic rock’s new reality, in which aging bands break down and then melt into one another. These are not “supergroups,” in which the very best and most famous musicians of an era join together to create an overhyped musical Voltron. These modern melted-together bands—let’s call them “shrunkgroups”—are merely composed of whoever is still alive.
The role of a shrunkgroup is to maintain the status quo for bands that still have high demand but diminished supply.
