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

by Steven Hyden

Of course, those people weren’t gods at all, but rather mortals who would grow old, make comeback records with Don Was and/or Jeff Lynne,

And then bargaining. (“If I sell Steel Wheels and Dirty Work, I can use the money to buy the latest Dylan box set, because owning eighteen versions of ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ will prevent me from hyperventilating.”)

The Internet isn’t nearly as good at telling stories as the radio was.

The general lack of information back then was crucial, because it made the possibility for genuine surprise real and magical.

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 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.)

I live for plumbing the soul of a single artist attempting to make a singular statement, even if that statement is “Dennis DeYoung is afraid that killer robots from the future will murder rock ’n’ roll.”

In light of the Rolling Stone list, greatest-hits albums now seemed fraudulent. If you wanted to know what a band was really up to, you had to do the work and dig into the original albums. For a classic-rock acolyte, putting all of the best songs on the same tape was tantamount to cheating.

Sgt. Pepper was instantly greeted with ecstatic praise upon its release on June 1, 1967. Time called it “a historic departure in the history of music.” The New York Times Book Review believed Sgt. Pepper signaled a “golden renaissance of song.” The London Times went even further, declaring that Sgt. Pepper was “a decisive moment in the history of western civilization.”

I came to Blonde on Blonde on a mission to get down to the bottom of it, but Blonde on Blonde is infinitely better as a record with no bottom.

Hundreds of artists have covered Bob Dylan’s songs, but only Bob Dylan can sing his songs a hundred different ways. It’s not just that Dylan changes up his phrasing, or that his voice sounds completely different depending on which decade you happen to be hearing him. Dylan’s singular talent as a vocalist is his ability to convey two or three or even four different emotions at the same time. Listen to Dylan sing “Just Like a Woman,” and you’ll hear cruelty, tenderness, anger, and sorrow. That mess of feelings inside your chest when somebody breaks your heart, which you can’t articulate because your brain doesn’t know how to reconcile the devastation that’s been wrought—that’s what Bob Dylan was born to express.

No band has ever formed with the intention of attracting a room full of guys.

Of course, postmortems decades after the fact mean nothing here. 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. In the realm of classic rock, this performance is the “big bang” creation story for virtually every rock star from the sixties and seventies.

“In actual fact, if it hadn’t been for the murder, we’d have thought it a very smooth gig by the skin of its fucking teeth,” Richards writes,

When you’re a politician in America, it’s always a good idea to keep your friends close, but Bruce Springsteen closer.

Two, Tom was surprisingly good at making music videos. He was even awarded MTV’s Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award, which is the one thing that Tom Petty, Britney Spears, and Rihanna have in common.

“Two Hearts” was a showcase for the ritualistic mic sharing between Bruce and Miami Steve that symbolizes friendship and efficient use of amplification technology.

“Turn the Page” doesn’t disavow the drudgery of the humdrum rock life but romanticizes this kind of existence—ridin’ sixteen hours with nothin’ to do sounds awful until you add a cinematic sax wail and a husky, whiskey-coated vocal.

In the shorthand of the film, each guy is turned into an archetype, sort of like a classic-rock version of the Seven Dwarves. There’s Arrogant (Robbie Robertson), Salty (Levon Helm), Sweet (Rick Danko), Tragic (Richard Manuel), and Quiet (Garth Hudson). We see these guys smoke cigarettes, shoot pool, shoot the shit, and generally come off like the coolest individuals to ever grow beards and wear wide-brimmed hats.

When I was a writer for the AV Club, I attempted to explain a concept I called 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.

Styx is part of what I call the “underclass” of classic rock that also includes Journey, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, Chicago, Boston, and Supertramp. These bands had their heyday in the seventies, and they either hailed from the Midwest or attracted a Midwesterner-heavy audience.

The mood before the Vampires was depressingly funereal. The music blaring over the PA was “Down by the River” by Neil Young and Crazy Horse, a song about taking something you love and murdering it.

No doubt, a lot of hippie dolts enjoy Phish. But the partisans that I’ve encountered are more akin to nerdy baseball fans who care way too much about Sabermetrics.

While searching for dad rock’s rhetorical roots, I reached out to Simon Reynolds, the best and probably most famous British rock critic of the last twenty-five years. (He’s certainly the best and most famous British rock critic for whom I had an email address.) I fired off a terse, half-baked, five-sentence email asking if he remembered hearing fellow writers use “dad rock” back in the nineties. Forty minutes later, Reynolds replied with a pithy four-hundred-word response that could’ve appeared with minimal editing in a special dad-rock issue of Uncut. This man produced insightful music commentary with the improvisational flair that Duane Allman once applied to ten-minute guitar solos.

Anybody who has ever read a record review knows that “nostalgic” is the worst thing an album can be, next to “problematic” and “by the Dave Matthews Band.” “Nostalgic” is code for “out-of-touch and conservative,”

Don’t trust anyone over thirty, the man can’t bust our music, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command—this is the stuff of one million documentaries about the sixties, the ones that always include the same grainy stock footage of hippie yahoos dancing in circles. (Grown-ups in the sixties apparently hated it when young people danced in circles.)

The first Ramones record sounded like the Beach Boys if the Beach Boys were from Queens and sniffed glue.

Anyway, my reason for choosing Pearl Jam wasn’t purely musical. Pearl Jam was playing at Wrigley Field, and I had loved seeing PJ play the Friendly Confines a few years earlier. It was one of my favorite concerts ever, in part because there was a three-hour rain delay that divided the concert into two parts. Admittedly, this is an odd, contrarian view of the gig. Many Pearl Jam fans hated this Wrigley show, because it didn’t wrap until after two a.m. and the band was forced to cut many of the songs that it had promised to play that night. But for me it was awesome because I spent that delay drinking between three and fifty Old Style beers and talking about high school girlfriends with my lifelong friend Mark.

When the award was announced, it took Dylan two weeks to publicly acknowledge the honor. When British newspaper the Telegraph finally tracked him down for a comment, Dylan’s response was gracious but cryptic: “Isn’t that something?” he mused, adding that he wouldn’t be there to accept the award, due to vague “pre-existing commitments.”

In 2016, artists over the age of fifty accounted for 50 percent of the $4.5 billion grossed by the year’s top-earning tours—among the cash cows were Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, and Guns N’ Roses.

Rock started out as a subculture before it became a monoculture, and it can still matter as a subculture.