Twilight of the Gods Quotes

“In the hierarchy of eighties heartland rock, Bruce Springsteen was president, Tom Petty was vice president, John Mellencamp was speaker of the house, Bob Seger was president pro tempore, and Bryan Adams was (I guess?) secretary of leather jackets.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Here’s a valuable lesson I’ve learned from working as a music journalist for nearly twenty years: if given the choice between interviewing a hip, up-and-coming musician and interviewing a past-his-prime has-been, take the has-been every single time. Some of my favorite interviews ever are with artists whose music I don’t even like. I’m talking about the time that Poison guitarist C. C. DeVille told me about how he used to drink paint thinner when he ran out of booze. Or when Kip Winger told me he still hates Lars Ulrich for throwing a dart at a Winger poster in Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” video. Has-beens have nothing to lose, whereas younger, hipper artists must think politically, as being candid can hurt you in the long run.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“I’ve repeated this process with virtually every major classic-rock artist and band that I love. I am now fully versed in the postsixties work of the Kinks, even the double-album rock operas that go on for forty-two hours. I enjoy at least one Doors album, An American Prayer, that was completed and released seven years after Jim Morrison died. I will defend not only both Page & Plant albums, but also the Page & Coverdale record. I own albums by every iteration of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and will argue that Crosby & Nash is in fact better than CSNY (though not CSN). I’m still not crazy about nineties Springsteen, but I will listen to Human Touch and Lucky Town when I don’t feel like playing Darkness on the Edge of Town or The River for the ten thousandth time. Come to think of it, Lucky Town is in fact much better than most people (even myself) give it credit for.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The mythology is what hooked me. Some kids read comic books; others glamorize athletes. My superheroes were rock stars who either had been deceased for decades or were well ensconced in the throes of middle age by the time I discovered them.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“It looks like a Lou Reed–themed TGI Fridays.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“(The members of JRAD also play in a band called Bustle in Your Hedgerow that specializes in instrumental versions of Zeppelin songs. Bustle in Your Hedgerow, by the way, is also awesome.)”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“That’s the real reason why music critics and cool kids hate Phish so much—they operate as if punk never happened.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“That is the sum total of what “rock” is now for the people who listen to rock radio and attend festivals like Rock Fest—an inscrutable equation that plugs old-world rock hedonism passed down fourth-hand from Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith into the bludgeoning, sadomasochistic sonic textures of post-grunge and nu metal. It’s party music for people who hate their lives.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“people probably hated disco because it inflamed something dark inside of them that they might not have known was there, and they also probably hated disco because disco (like a lot of pop music) was getting pretty fucking ridiculous and played out in 1979. What’s not disputed in either narrative is the suggestion that”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“This view was forwarded most prominently by music critic Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, who observed at the end of 1979 that “white males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and [Latinos], and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“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.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Sometimes, they were even willing to get their hands dirty. In Fredric Dannen’s 1990 book Hit Men, the best-ever exposé of the music business of the seventies and eighties,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“McCartney II has similarly attained cult status among indie fans and artists who regard it as forward-thinking avant-electronica. But those people didn’t hear McCartney II in the context in which it was released. The album came out four months after McCartney spent nine days in a Japanese jail for possession of 219 grams of weed while on tour with Wings. The band fell apart after the tour was canceled, prompting McCartney to release his solo recordings as McCartney II. It’s not difficult to understand why McCartney was perceived at the time to be sort of dumb and perpetually stoned, and how this perception influenced the opinion that McCartney II was mere folly, rather than visionary genius. I think the truth about McCartney II is somewhere in the middle. I love the album because the songs are good and weird and utterly unlike anything else in McCartney’s catalog. But I also love it because the dumb/stoned aspects of the record are inextricable from the visionary-genius aspects. McCartney II is good because it’s good, and good because it’s bad.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Apparently, Paul McCartney and I were on the same wavelength that night, because five songs into the set, he played a number that only a small, demented fraction of the audience wanted to hear. And yet there he was, jamming on “Temporary Secretary,” seemingly oblivious to the mass confusion created by the song’s mind-bending mess of synth bleeps and slashing acoustic guitar and McCartney’s robo-ranting about needing a woman who can be a belly dancer but not a true romancer. I loved it, and I loved how the people around me didn’t love it.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“For many of the people in my immediate vicinity, it was clear that the Beatles (to say nothing of McCartney’s solo career) ceased to be a going concern once the Summer of Love commenced. Anything in the set list that was even mildly psychedelic—“The Fool on the Hill,” “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite”—went over like Timothy Leary at the 1968 Republican National Convention. Apparently, there are still people for whom Sgt. Pepper is a radical—perhaps too radical—musical experiment. This wasn’t a classic-rock-radio crowd, it was an oldies-radio crowd. I, too, was hoping to hear my favorite Beatles hits. But I also secretly wished that McCartney would play “Temporary Secretary,” one of the battiest tracks from one of his battiest solo albums, 1980’s McCartney II. I believe that “Temporary Secretary” is a legitimately great song, even if it is totally bonkers. “Temporary Secretary” sounds like a businessman discussing his staffing practices while also imitating a car alarm. It’s genius! But the main reason I wanted to hear “Temporary Secretary” is because I knew that it would confound all of the boomers in the house who stopped following Paul McCartney’s career after he wrote “Michelle.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Just try to find an uncompelling photo of Fleetwood Mac taken at any point between 1975 and 1987. I've spent hours scouring Google Images in search of a single Fleetwood Mac band photo to which I am not sexually attracted, and failed every time.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Steve Gorman,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Against Me! fans would respond. This was the first time”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The best of these early albums is 2011’s Twin Fantasy,”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Joe Russo’s Almost Dead (or JRAD).”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The hot-shit, skinny-ass white guy in leather pants who takes pulls off Jack Daniel’s bottles while blasting blooze-rock riffs out of his Gibson—that archetype is finished, and it’s never coming back.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The albums chart is still expected to be a reliable indicator of what’s happening in pop culture at this very moment. If the chart measured strictly actual album sales, it would be reduced to music that appeals only to people who still buy music. And then we would have to accept that the apotheosis of popular culture is Adele and Christmas records by dorky vocal groups like Pentatonix.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“Raw Power by the Stooges is a classic rock record, but it’s not a classic rock record. Meanwhile, Hi Infidelity by REO Speedwagon is not a classic rock record, but it is a classic rock record. Classic is a value judgment, whereas classic rock denotes a particular era of music signified by bands who may or may not be shitty. I am delving into the latter.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“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.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“The best you can hope for at any gig is Altamont-like spontaneity where nobody happens to get killed.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“My favorite Black Sabbath album, 1972’s Vol. 4, ranks with Bowie’s Station to Station as one of the greatest cocaine albums in rock history. Black Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler estimates that the band spent $75,000 on blow in ’72—that’s fifteen grand more than the cost of recording Vol. 4. It’s no wonder Black Sabbath originally wanted to call the album Snowblind.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock

“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 the kind of life that most of us will never live. 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. Levon stayed on the road. He went down swinging. All Robbie did was talk about it.”
― Steven Hyden, Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock