THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

Last month, while American consumers were being prepped and primed by media outlets and marketers for the 40th Anniversary of the Woodstock Festival, another anniversary was taking place at the beginning of August. I don’t want to be some kind of killjoy and take away from the nostalgic image blitz of stoned-out youth frolicking in the New England mud bathed in the electric rain of rock gods and demigods, many of whom I still worship. But, as Frank Zappa once said to me, “The world will end in nostalgia,” so it seems logical that I can’t get thoughts of August 6, 1945 out of my mind. Maybe it’s because the hills above my house have been on fire for the last several weeks, raining down ash and producing atmospheric conditions around us that resemble the smoky, yellow eclipse lit haze of some other planet. Driving back home from San Diego, I could see the giant mushroom cloud pluming over Pasadena from over a hundred miles away.

At 8:15 AM on that August morning 64 years ago, a B-29 bomber dropped a single-bomb with the charming nickname “Little Boy” over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. On August 9, a second bomb called “Fat Man” was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. These particular targets were chosen according to Stephen M. Younger in his book, "The Bomb: A New History", because they “had not suffered from the devastating bombing raids that had reduced Tokyo and other cities to little more than smoldering ruins. The hills that surrounded Hiroshima and Nagasaki would focus the effect of the blast, further increasing the destruction caused by the bombs.”

“Little Boy” dropped in forty-three seconds to nineteen-hundred feet above Hiroshima and exploded. The height had been chosen “to maximize the damage produced by the expanding nuclear fireball.” Its detonation created an intense flash that was called “brighter than a thousand suns.” Within seconds, an immense shock wave and firestorm swept the city destroying everything in its wake including some 68,000 buildings. Three days later, as Younger reports, “the United States demonstrated to Japan and the world that Hiroshima was not a one-off event” when it completely destroyed Nagasaki with a second atom bomb.

I heard a recent, breathless radio promo for a show called “Surviving Disaster” on Spike TV that described it this way—you have 20 seconds to cover your eyes and about 20 minutes to take cover from radioactive fallout. The promo ponderously warned, “It’s not a question of whether it will happen, but when.”

Just how the show is drawing the conclusion of inevitability is unclear, but the leap from the catastrophic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to nuclear attack as entertainment value is a mind-boggling, but not necessarily American impulse. Godzilla is not only an iconic film monster, but is held in Japan with an almost religious reverence. One reason why is that Godzilla, Rodan, and other Japanese monster movies have been seen as a symbolic, subliminal response, inspired by the Japanese experience with the atomic attacks. Godzilla awakes in the film as the result of French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Despite its grave delivery, the Spike promo is completely removed from the terrible reality of what actually occurred in August, 1945.

Estimates for the death toll from both bombings has been estimated at well over one-hundred times the casualties from the 9/11 attacks. This figure includes an estimated from sixty-six-thousand to one-hundred-forty thousand instant deaths in Hiroshima and an estimated forty-thousand in Nagasaki. We know that in the immediate five years following, one-quarter of a million more died with untold hundreds of thousands more in the decades following the bombings from radioactive related diseases. But statistics remove us from the human factor of disaster and the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is beyond human imagination.

Hiroshima has been called “the exclamation point of the twentieth century”, but two perspectives from survivors are more than enough to tattoo the pictures forever in one’s brain. Stephanie Cooke tells of one in her recent book, "In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age": “…a nineteen-year-old girl who survived reported a remarkable sight near a public garden. Amid the bodily remains, burned black and immobilized at the moment of impact, there was, she said, ‘a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her arms.’”

In "Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World", Tom Zoellner describes how Japanese writer, Yoko Ota, remembers the white flash as “the collapse of the earth which it was said would take place at the end of the world.”

Zoellner continues, “Even President Truman, who was famously coolheaded about the decision to use the weapon on Japan, wondered in his diary if the act he would soon authorize was ‘the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous ark.’"

When news of the successful atom bombing of Hiroshima reached the team of scientists behind its invention in Los Alamos, New Mexico, “there was a general excitement, and scientists rushed to book tables at Santa Fe’s best restaurant to celebrate the achievement. But that night’s party on the mesa was a grim affair. Almost nobody danced, and people sat in quiet conversation, discussing the damage reports on the other side of the world. When J. Robert Oppenheimer left the party, he saw one of his colleagues—cold sober—vomiting in the bushes.”

The decision to drop the atom bomb is a controversy that will remain unsettled and is examined at length by Richard Rhodes in his books about the nuclear age. One school of thought is that the Japanese doctrine of "defense at all costs" was a bluff; another indicates that they had already expressed a willingness to negotiate a cease-fire through Russian back channels. According to the Russians, the atom bomb was secondary and it was the declaration of war against Japan by Moscow that was the deciding factor in ending of the war.

In her illuminating book, "Troubled Apologies: Among Japan, Korea, and the United States", Alexis Dudden describes both US media censorship and outright fabrication about the bombing of Japan as propelling “the basic story line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki that Americans would come to cling to as history at the cost of learning what was actually going on: ‘the bombs saved lives.’…the US government and its officially placed mouthpiece at the New York Times established as a fact that no one in Hiroshima had died from radiation and that only foreign lies (British or Japanese) suggested otherwise.”

The New York Times’ science writer who was an eyewitness over Nagasaki, William “Atomic Bill” Laurence, won a Pulitzer Prize for his early, evangelical coverage of atomic weapons. His account of the event demonstrates that he was not only distant from the event by mere altitude, but close to some kind of atomic rapture:

“Being close to it and watching it as it was being fashioned into a living thing so exquisitely shaped that any sculptor would be proud to have created it, one felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural…Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.”

Historically, not everyone was sold. Harvard physicist George B. Kistiakowsky witnessed the Trinity test in July, 1945 only several weeks before the atomic bombing raid on Japan and called it, “the nearest thing to Doomsday that one could possible imagine. I am sure that at the end of the world—in the last millisecond—the last man will see what we have just seen.”

John Hersey was the first to write of the human factor in his long August 1946 New Yorker essay profiling regular people on the ground in Hiroshima. The day after the Trinity test sixty-eight scientists at the University of Chicago signed a confidential letter to Harry Truman urging him not to use the device. They wrote presciently: “If after the war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of this new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation.”

Leo Szilard, the scientist who persuaded his colleagues to write the letter, and the man who conceived of the chain reaction and worked on the Manhattan Project later referred to himself and other atomic scientists as “mass murderers.”

“Why did they have to go and drop another?" a wife of one of the atomic scientists asked upon hearing the news of Nagasaki. “The first one would have finished the war off.” Short of an apology, this kind of self-reflection on the part of civilians as well as the scientists—including Einstein—who were behind the creation of the Atomic Era, leads one to wonder what we can do to make amends today.

There is a long tradition—if not ritual—of apology in Asian cultures. It is one that seems to have been adopted for some time by Americans, who are now accustomed to press conference scenes where morally straying politicians apologize to the nation, their constituents, wives, and families for errant behavior. More recently, other kinds of less predictable apologies have appeared.

Last February, the Senate apologized to Native Americans for atrocities committed during the opening and seizing of their lands. On July 29, the US House of Representatives issued a resolution formally apologizing to black Americans for slavery one-hundred forty years after its abolition. After forty years of silence, at a local Columbus, Georgia Kiwanis Club on August 21, Lt. William Calley (the only Army officer convicted of the 1968 My Lai massacre), in an extraordinary and unexpected apology, expressed his “remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry."

Twenty years ago, Congress apologized for the World War II interning of Japanese Americans in concentration camps. Why not Hiroshima? None other than the author of "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World" said the following in 1995: “The United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Bill Clinton was just towing a bipartisan line.

Alexis Dudden traveled with President George W. Bush on a trip to Tokyo during 2002 on a mission, among other things, to thank the Japanese government for its support of the War on Terror and to launch plans to celebrate the 150-year anniversary of Japanese-American relations. Dudden relates that she “had an unexpected, theatrical education in one of the trajectories of Hiroshima’s history during (a) routine walk.” As she passed down the main boulevard near the Japanese Parliament and National Library, “several of the notorious black trucks popular with the country’s extreme right wing passed…with the lead van blaring the customary martial songs. This was not unusual, but the message pouring from the loud speakers stopped me flat—‘Welcome to Japan, President Bush of the United States of America! Apologize for Hiroshima and enjoy your stay!’”

She goes on to say, “Throughout the recent era of apologies all around—or maybe in spite of it—there has remained one matter on which Washington holds firm, regardless of who is in office—there will be no apology for Hiroshima or Nagasaki.”

Originally, the lowest projection of how many American lives would have been saved by avoiding a costly land invasion of Japan by using the bomb was twenty-six thousand casualties. Dudden observes, “Americans transferred what happened—the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—for an event that never took place—the proposed land invasion of Japan—to stand in for history. By the early 1950s, the imagined truth was American myth, and in 1959, President Truman wrote for the record that the bombs spared 'half a million' American lives, and that he 'never lost any sleep over the decision.' Over the years…American storytelling has come to count the number of ‘saved’ Americans as high as 1 million. (This number appeared squarely in David McCullough’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize winning biography, Truman, despite abundant evidence to the contrary at the time.)”

Apologies are more complicated than they appear. Dudden’s book details the way that formal apologies can be used to cloak deeper strategy to avoid restitution and financial penalties. As to the US government’s obdurate stance, Dudden concludes, “The chronic inability to confront how America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japanese people in 1945 might constitute the kind of history for which survivors would seek an apology, let alone why the use of such weapons might represent a crime against humanity, is sustained by Washington’s determination to maintain these weapons as the once and future legitimate tools of the national arsenal. It is not at all by chance that among weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological—only nuclear weapons are not prohibited by international law. Were it otherwise, the likelihood that the history of America’s use of them on Japan would generate changes of attempted genocide against the United States or Harry Truman would increase exponentially.”

Last April, President Obama made strong statements during a visit to Prague about his commitment to abolish nuclear weapons. His speech called for an international summit on the subject by the end of the year. The Mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba said, “As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act, defining U.S. responsibility in a historical context." Akiba asked Obama to hold the summit in Hiroshima.

Our family had a Japanese exchange student staying with us for a year. After she had been living with us for a while, I felt compelled to speak with her about her hometown of Hiroshima and to apologize in my own way for what had happened before either of us had been born. She seemed surprised at my gesture and we spoke about the event in the abstract—her parents had been children at the time and spoke little to her, if at all, about their memories. I suppose that the American generation preceding mine who experienced the direct consequences of World War II might argue with my stance on apology citing my distance from the events that defined them, in many cases, for the rest of their lives.

I find it interesting that the word “apology” and “apocalypse” have the same prefix. Apology is said to be rooted in words originally meaning “regret, defense, or justification” and giving an account or story of oneself. Apocalypse is rooted in the Latin word meaning “revelation” and the Ancient Greek meaning “to uncover” as in to lift a veil. The prefix “apo” means “from, away, off”. Perhaps there is a connection between the act of apologizing and the avoiding of apocalypse—by this logic, if we lift the veil that hides our own truth, then revelation might follow. A year after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the esteemed Indian yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, reflected on the discovery of uranium: “The human mind can and must liberate within itself energies greater than those within stones and metals, lest the material atomic giant, newly unleashed, turn on the world in mindless destruction.”

With the first new ruling party now established in Japan in over fifty years, an appropriate overture to the new government from the American President whose campaign mantra was “change” should be to agree to hold the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in Hiroshima and take the world stage by opening his remarks with an apology to the people of Japan. Think about it the next time you are being served sushi—these people were our enemies? Or as Allen Ginsberg might say, “We are the Japan.”

THE VAMPIRE THEORY OF ROCK AND ROLL

Nobody knows exactly when or where rock and roll started, but it’s probably a good bet that it started at the crossroads in Mississippi where blues legend, Robert Johnson, made his pact with the Devil. There are many variations on this theme as all great origin myths deserve. One describes how Johnson was directed to arrive at midnight at a plantation crossroads where the Dark Stranger tuned his guitar. In another version, he was given a guitar by the father of all agents and learned how to play like a demon in just one night while sitting on top of a gravestone in a local cemetery. What we do know from Johnson’s contemporaries who described his amazing, seemingly overnight talent and success, and his surviving masterpiece recording are enough evidence to speculate on a supernatural origin for his unique skill. Whatever actually happened, the Faustian bargain certainly informed a lot about music industry business models ever since. But what’s more important is that rock and roll has always been informed by a death wish probably since it’s an adolescent music at heart that is uncertain about mortality, but as foolishly daring as a teenage driver with a fast car.

The first recording with the actual title, “Rock and Roll”, was released by the Boswell Sisters in 1934. Hardly a rhythmic cousin inspired by the long snake moan of the Delta Blues, this trio’s song spreads the message in a big band, pop setting, but the meaning is still clear despite it’s white bread, if swinging delivery. It’s still all about sex even though drugs and electrification would arrive later. Rock and Roll takes a cue from the industry standard of “farewell tours” in that, its death has been exaggerated and proclaimed many times from early cynics like Frank Sinatra and Steve Allen. The former loudly denigrated rockers as lowlifes, miscreants, traitors, and troglodytes. He especially singled out The Beatles who he called “creeps” and cultural enemies of the state—though he was later to repent with a rather flaccid cover of “Something”. Steve Allen famously tried his best to cut the young upstart rock and roll down to size by humiliating Elvis Presley during an early TV appearance when he had the King sing “Hound Dog” to a real dog set on a pedestal.

They were not alone in the 50’s when “concerned” parent groups, white “citizen’s councils” and other community organizations attempted to alert families to the dangers of this musical form which created juvenile delinquents and whose connections to African Americans and the sensual abandon of jazz were clearly outrageous game changers. Nobody could have predicted what was to come despite early warnings like the West African beat of Bo Diddley. You didn’t have to drum along to the “bump de bump, bump, bump, bump” to add the grind to the recipe and realize that this music was all about the beat and like a jungle telegraph echoed its earlier tribal origins.

Maybe the white status quo sensed that this revolutionary music of slaves and field hands like the great American 20th century poet, Muddy Waters, could lead somehow to overturn the Establishment—their instincts were correct given rock and roll’s eventual cutting of a swath from the Delta through to America’s blackboard jungles, urban sprawl and a neo-tribalistic sequence of youth mutations of sock-hops, boogeying in the back of mom and dad’s car and at the drive-in, screaming Beatles fans, love-ins at Monterey and Woodstock, fan sites, Hip Hop culture successfully invading the suburban mall, and web rings, and Band MySpace pages.

Even the attempted co-opting of rock and roll by safe, white singers like Pat Boone, for example, who hijacked Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” , divesting it of its undulating, native rhythms and innuendo (“Got a gal named Sue, she knows just what to do”) was only a blip. Disco was another Barbarian at the Gates which ultimately failed to take its mantle and actually inspired post MC5 punk, and was ceremoniously served its own funeral pyre at a disco record burning at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1976. In a frightening reprise of 50’s censorship and parental concern, the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Council) spearheaded by drummer and Vice Presidential spouse, Tipper Gore, was successful in providing convenient labels for popular music to point out its incipient dangers to parents too lazy to listen to the lyrics themselves. Rock and roll survived the labeling system and other vain efforts to stop the beat of time.

Who killed rock and roll, then? Well, like its historical collateral damage of multiple rock and roll suicides, it actually succumbed to self-immolation like a speeding kamikaze guitar run—not in a grand crescendo of Marshall stacks feeding back overamped to 11 with smoke bombs and drums thrilling in deafening splendor—but in greed, naiveté, and most of all, as the result of a generational shift. The beginning of the end was actually in 1968. It was in that year that The Doors decided to sell “Light My Fire” to Buick as a soundtrack for a car commercial. It not only was a source of contention between Jim Morrison and the other three band members—because Jim didn’t want to do it—but the start of a lethal love affair between Madison Avenue and its musical concubine. It was Advertising that killed the Beast.

If Mad Ave killed rock and roll, then MTV was the nail in the coffin. The idea of “music” television may have sounded like a good idea at the time because the inmates had never run the asylum. Rock and roll was always an embarrassment in the television of the 50’s and 60’s. Shows like “Hullabaloo” and “Shindig” suffered from producers and network executives doing too much frugging at clubs with go-go girls and having bad acid experiences that became the TV light shows of op-art, fisheye, multiple single-frame, swirling psychedelia of wall paper surrounding recording artists of the day. Rock was certainly the wicked stepchild of the musical arts. It always seemed to be introduced as the embarrassing poseur, and black sheep of the family—which it was proudly when it worked well.

Ed Sullivan opened up the television stage in what seemed to be a genuine commercial desire to connect with music of all kinds—but the network censors did their best to emasculate bands like The Doors—who infamously did not change the word “higher” in their performance of “Light My Fire” and The Rolling Stones, eventually to become one of rock’s billion dollar conglomerates who did, in fact, change the lyrics to “Let’s Spend The Night Together”, by substituting “some time” in lieu of “the night”. Maybe the art of negotiation made them a better business proposition in the long term. As they say, "you can’t always get what you want."

But, creating visual interpretations by twenty-something, music video “directors” is dodgy because it eliminates the primary experience that is the salient feature of music as an art form. Music videos substitute a visual interpretation that is often quite literal or at the other end of the spectrum, totally contrived, as a substitute for the listener coming to terms with their own experience as it connects with what a song is saying. They were also blatant commercials to upsell records. When The Beatles did early videos for songs like “I Am The Walrus” from “The Magical Mystery Tour”, and “All You Need Is Love”, there was a purity and charm to them because they were unpremeditated and seemed almost like afterthoughts.

The other danger factor was pointed out to me once during a conversation with Frank Zappa just after MTV came on the scene. “How did MTV change music, Frank?” I asked. Without losing a beat, the Maestro intoned, blowing out a plume of smoke, “It turned musicians into models.”

It also had the effect of connecting popular music more directly with the advertisers who would be its nemesis. While it was a rarity for rock and roll to infiltrate the province of Madison Avenue jingles and Hollywood soundtracks, that began to change as rock and roll, itself, became less of a movement and more of a business. Its mass appeal could no longer be denied as it became newsworthy when colorful, Dionysian multitudes grew to attend festivals and stadiums. Even the gold and platinum standards for record sales had to be adjusted higher to accommodate increased audiences for the category. Movie executives were also smoking dope and doing the Swim, and started catering to yuppie audiences with nostalgic, Motown-infused soundtracks replacing or augmenting original motion picture scores. Like music videos, some movies such as “The Big Chill” leaned far too heavily on conveying emotional weight by literally using “The Weight” instead of dialogue and character to drive story structure.

In the 50’s and 60’s, rock and roll wasn’t really a business yet because it was easy to deny. I remember a visit with Little Richard at his house which had been at the Hyatt on Sunset for many years. He proudly displayed his gold records to my brother and me, and remarked that they were the first he’d ever received. This was in 1995. The rip-offs of seminal artists like Richard, Chuck Berry, and others who were denied royalties or entered into bad deals is now the stuff of history with some reparations made, usually through court settlements. Contracts in the 60’s looked like they were signed with a pen in one hand and a joint in the other. I watched “Monterey Pop” recently with my kids who are 8 and 15 and saw that—through their eyes and questions—that it was almost like viewing an ethnographic documentary. It all looks so naive and innocent, and many of the musicians were, too, with respect to the business side of music.

I’ve worked with D.A. Pennebaker on a number of projects who with Richard Leacock and also with the Maysles were largely responsible for cinema verite style of film making. Pennebaker is also well known for his great documentary, “Don’t Look Back”, which documented Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. When I was clearing the video rights for “Don’t Look Back” and “Monterey Pop” as well as on another project for the 20th anniversary of Woodstock, I had to reference the original artist contracts. Jimi Hendrix’s contract for Monterey was signed by his lawyer and most likely never seen by him. The Who were paid $2500 for their Woodstock performance, and were only among several who insisted—and actually got paid for the celebrated free festival. Although he was the first artist to be paid a hundred-thousand dollars for one concert, Jimi left only twenty-thousand when he died. Tom Petty talks about when, as a teenager, he first signed with MCA Records and didn’t understand how books entered into it when he saw the clause about “publishing”. He had the courage and fortitude to eventually sue to get his royalty earnings from publishing, but many such sagas do not share such a happy ending. Even if artists were not paying a lot of attention to deal terms, there were a lot of record company executives, managers, shysters, agents, interlopers, and operators who were.

It was only natural that rock and roll became an industry in the 80’s fueled by cocaine, hookers and other fresh marketing tactics that innovated from the original 50's payola techniques. But most of all, it was the introduction of the CD format that changed the business model. And why shouldn’t it have? Imagine the first meeting where the concept was tendered: “I want to replace vinyl with this!” (Holds up disc which glints like gold in the Hollywood sunlight streaming through the high windows). “What is that?” “It’s plastic. The total cost is going to be about $2.50 to manufacture and including all your distribution and marketing costs! And guess what? We can mark it up as much as 100%! And it will create a whole new market for players, too!” The executive probably was cynical at first, especially at the low cost, but the rest is history as we replaced our collection with an audiophile digital version—even though “Who’s Next” still sounds better on vinyl.

Inevitably, in a lesson that Wall Street should have paid attention to, greed caught up. The Industry now only consists of several major labels left standing or somewhat tottering worldwide in a landscape of thousands of independent labels, a new singles business invented by iTunes, Limewire, MySpace fan pages, Mac garage band, and Amazon downloads. The Internet broke the bank with the Napster peer-to-peer sharing model and a generation that took piracy to another level entirely—evidenced now by Apple relenting last week on DRM. Not only were the inmates now running the asylum, but they were controlling the distribution, too.

The record business is now the iPod economy with well over 100 million sold, over half a billion iTunes software downloads, over $120 million in 2007 profits, and well over a $1billion worth of digital downloads annually. The major labels should have seen that we were on the eve of a new singles business—instead it decided it was a better idea to sue its own customers.

As the mass audience for music grew in the 80’s, arena rock established the tour and merchandise as the revenue model. With the decline in record sales in the last decade, looking to the 90’s heyday when million-sellers used to be the rule, now a hundred thousand unit seller is a big deal outside of certain legacy performers. The only two growth markets for records are for world music and Christian rock which grew from 4% of overall sales in 2000 to over 10% last year. Maybe Jesus will resuscitate the Big Beat, but given the cryogenic state of the industry today, it is clearly a job for an entity with supernatural powers.

Where we are now is that the music, itself, is the Trojan horse stalking consumers as the advertisement for the tour and merchandise. On average, there are forty-thousand concerts a year with average attendance of five thousand tickets sold. The average merchandise per person is 6-8 per customer, but it can be upwards of $20 depending on the artist and with annual market of approximately $1.5 billion. That’s a lot of t-shirts.

The band logo is the final stamp of the rock group as corporation. Advertising killed rock because it legitimized it. Rock and roll’s very existence was that it was the illegitimate child of rhythm and blues, jazz, the Delta, and far off Yoruba beats. As the baby boomers grew older, they became the captains of industry and technology and Madison Avenue and selfishly wanted to hear their own soundtrack—even if appropriated to a thirty-second spot. Bruce Springsteen ordered a cease and desist when Ronald Reagan tried to use his “Born In The USA” for promoting the Republican cause in the 80’s. That should have been a sign.

I mean, Fleetwood Mac in association with Bill Clinton is self-explanatory in a cuddly, yuppie sort of way. But now, rock music is a featured player without guilt and plays party agnostic at political conventions, on the campaign trail, and inaugural balls. How does this scenario equate with “Born To Be Wild” and the bikers getting blown away at the end of “Easy Rider”? How does political endorsement add up when compared to the spirit of Jimi Hendrix’s deconstruction masterpiece performance of the National Anthem during the Vietnam War and Berkeley riots?

When I was growing up in the 60’s, my junior high school gym coach used to call me “Hair” and vilified my music wishing that it would die. It made my passion for the music even stronger. Now, I find it irksome that Bruce Springsteen and Prince perform at the Super Bowl, and rock and roll is the soundtrack to television sports—adding its energy, guitar army, and percussive attack to connect with its viewers who all apparently have grown too old to remember when rock and roll was outlaw music. And am I alone in wondering what “Who Are You” has to do with forensics? Maybe it’s in memories like my battles with the gym coach where rock still lives—as a memory, the music exists as a reference point in time when a song or a band or a show references a moment in our lives that was significant—or even if it was insignificant as Robert Plant once put it—as something “deep and meaningless”. He also said, “I’ve lived a hundred years in rock and roll.” Perhaps that’s long enough for those who have really lived it, but that’s another story…

The day after Keith Moon died, my brother, Jeff, finally got to interview John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey for his movie, “The Kids Are Alright”. During the interview, he asked Roger about the future of rock and roll—a pointed question for The Who, at least, given that they’d just lost their key man. Roger said to him, “Rock and roll doesn’t have a future, so shut up!” That sort of ended the interview, but Jeff still used “Long Live Rock”, with its anthemic refrain, “Rock is Dead” for the end credits of the film—whether to give hope or irony, I’ll never ask for fear it would be a repeat of what Pete Townshend once said to him when Jeff asked what the meaning of his song, “Who Are You” was. Pete replied slyly, “Ask Harold Pinter.” My brother and I always wanted to riff on Pete's famous lines from "My Generation" and say to him, "Hope we get old before we die..." But, we never found the right moment and the lyrics seemed to have haunted him ever since anyway. Rock and roll does not look well in the mirror.

Rock and roll suffers from having become our classical music. It’s cross-generational now. When I was running the Jimi Hendrix Foundation, he had a greatest hits collection called “The Ultimate Experience” that had been selling twenty-thousand units a month for almost two years. Estate Creative Director and former Hendrix producer, Alan Douglas, wondered who was buying all these records and conducted a marketing survey. The results were that 60% of the albums were being bought by fans under twenty. Jimi was now effectively converting his third generation of fans from beyond the grave. But, then again, Jimi is a classical composer now.

Rock and roll shouldn’t age gracefully for some kind of old timers day, endless reunion tours, and unplugged sets. Maybe Keith, Jimi, Janis, Jim, Brian, Buddy, Ritchie, Gene, Eddie, Otis, and all the others were lucky in some way to be frozen in time. The problem with rock and roll is that it was always a euphemism for the mystery dance, so perhaps we were screwed from the beginning. And maybe, just maybe, rock and roll isn’t dead after all, but is just about to start out on one of its annual “farewell tours.” As the song says, “Hail, hail…”