THE CAVE MIND OPERATING SYSTEM

Notorious, fabled “Beat” writer and author of “Naked Lunch”, William S. Burroughs, once defined “paranoia” as “just the state of having all the facts.” Now maybe I’m suffering a little bit from being overwhelmed by facts, but the smiley face has always made me suspicious that it can’t be all that good. At first, Evolutionary biology may not be the most likely refuge of the paranoid, but in the case of the smiley face, it’s brought me nothing less than religion.

The next time your better half, best friend, boss, helpful sales person or gleaming white toothed celebrity smiles at you, think on this—according to Evolutionary biology, the origin of the smile is the reflex that predators make when bearing their teeth at the sight of prospective food. Clearly, there is something we can learn from considering our animal ancestry and in particular, a lot it can teach us about behaviors that we either take for granted, assume we know all about or don’t even question at all. It doesn’t require lifting the veil of time and scrying into the mists of history—it only takes a glimpse at the new gods of sex, drugs, and rock and roll to recognize that we are creatures of biology, first and foremost. Maybe it’s time to use this fact to our advantage once again, given that there are predators like religious fanatics, evil bankers, credit card, and loan sharks on the loose.

I’ve always believed that there’s a lot we can learn from the Upper Paleolithic, a time period when many of our ancestors were retreating from the ice and snow into the solace of fire lit caves. “What can we learn from The Flintstones?” you might ask, besides the fact that all animated shows of yesteryear will at one time or another suffer from being turned into live action features as Hollywood studios trawl the depths of television for recycling purposes. Consider also a trend that Faith Popcorn described in her 1991 book, “The Popcorn Report” which she labeled “cocooning,” whereupon Yuppies are seen as retreating into the new cave of their media centric homes as a way to find relief from the modern rat race. There’s a reason that the root of the word “hearth” is easily found by dropping its final letter “h”. The fireside was once the “heart” of the home and may be again in the form of the postmodern, Green kitchen, if Kevin Henry is right in his latest post on his blog, “The Connected Kitchen”.

My bias is that art usually holds the key to human consciousness at any given time in history and looking at so-called “Prehistoric Art” probably possesses the veritable Keys to the Kingdom. Take for example, the 1879 discovery of the famous cave at Altamira in Spain, which has been called “the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic Art.” One summer day, a Spanish nobleman and amateur archeologist named Don Marcelino de Sautuola was joined by his young daughter, Maria, in a cave on his estate which he had explored for artifacts many times before. Called by John E. Pfeiffer in his book, "The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Art and Religion," “one of the great tales in the annals of prehistory,” this episode can be seen as having something to teach us almost like an Upper Paleolithic OS about the powers of common sense and seeing to through the obvious.

Now the stuff of legend, his daughter (whose age varies according the particular account from five and seven to twelve), had wandered into a small, side chamber that was three-to-five feet high in most places. Don Marcelino had traversed it numerous times without noticing what made his daughter cry out loud, “Toros, toros, toros!” Interesting was that in his search for stone artifacts, he was always scouring the floor of the cave and had never actually looked up at the ceiling. As Pfeiffer describes it, “Nothing had prepared Sautuola for the shock of such a discovery. He had explored the chamber and thought he knew what was in it.” While he had used his lantern to avoid being bumped on the head by the protuberances that were covered with vivid paintings in black, red, pinks, and browns, it was by the lantern light that his child made the discovery simply by looking up. Little did she realize that in doing so and revealing the hidden prehistoric art that it would turn her father into an advocate tied to evolutionary theory and to his grave be much maligned as a crank and charlatan by the then protectionist, doubting world of traditional archeology.

An inspiration for his courage in facing harsh criticism that saw the cave paintings as forgeries, his story provides us with OS Principle Number One from the Upper Paleolithic:

1. SOMETIMES A BUMP ON THE HEAD IS A GOOD THING

In other words, always Look Up in addition to staring at your feet! This is also known as OVER, UNDER, SIDEWAYS, DOWN or the Yardbirds’ Principle since it’s named after their 1965 hit.

Many of the famous caves in Western Europe from the Upper Paleolithic were discovered by children. This includes the most celebrated one of all, France’s Lascaux Cave, discovered in 1940 by four youths who were chasing a pet dog named Robot, who had disappeared into a hole in the ground that turned out to lead to the great subterranean galleries below. Some are even named after their youthful discoverers like “Les Trois Freres” after the three young brothers who first crawled its lengths.

As Pfeiffer says about Maria, the discoverer of the Altamira cave, “…she was too young to have acquired a bias against looking up rather than looking down.” He continues that her father, “…had no real interest in the walls or ceiling of the cave. He was an excavator interested above all in what he could find at his feet, on the floor, such things as flint artifacts and bones and remains of hearths. The low ceiling of the side chamber was only a hazard to him, something to avoid.” The point is that life is at the very least, three-dimensional and we need to see ourselves both inside and out of the box in order to be creative and truly “think outside the box”.

This leads us inevitably to OS Principle Number Two from the Upper Paleolithic:

2. WHEN IN DOUBT, ASK A CHILD

When in doubt, don’t let age or experience be a factor. I remember once when my daughter was four and she asked me, “Daddy, why does infinity never stop?” For the first time as a parent, I had the survival instinct to ask her instead of trying to come up with any sort of reasonable answer. “What do you think, honey?” I asked her. Without losing a beat she replied, “Because they ran out of numbers!” You might be astounded by the insights offered by the unbiased eyes of the culturally agnostic and the brains of young souls who are closer to the tabula rasa.

Pfeiffer says, “Archeological records include many cases of art overlooked. The eye never comes innocent to its subject. Everything seen is a blend of what actually exists out there, the “real” object, and the viewer’s expectations, upbringing, and current state of mind. It is amazing what you can miss when you do not expect to see anything or, given a strong enough motive, what you can see that is not there. Unless the mind is properly adjusted or set, anticipating a revelation of a particular sort, nothing happens.”

Principle three, therefore, follows this theme of perception:

3. YOU CAN’T BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU SEE AND HEAR, CAN YOU?

Otherwise known as the “Up From The Skies” Principle after the lyrics from Jimi Hendrix. Or better yet, it could be called “Anticipate Revelation.”

Why do the Aboriginal people of Australia believe that our world is the dream and that the true world is the Dreamtime beyond our consensus reality? With 40,000 to 50,000 years of experience to draw upon, one has to ask the question. Like the San people of South Africa, the Aborigines are one of the only cultures who still have an ongoing tradition of painting caves.

You don’t have to get tribal to appreciate the Other Side of the Sky. There is a story about visionary English poet, William Blake, that is a case in point. Upon hearing a knock on the door, his wife once answered the caller’s inquiry as to whether Mr. Blake was at home, by responding: “No. He spends most of his time in heaven.”

Shamanic cultures tend not to throw out anything that works. In other words, if you are bent on survival, why dispose of the practical. This is just one factor that supports the efficacy of shamanism as an alternative medical practice as well as a way of seeing that there are many more worlds than ordinary “9 to 5” reality. Chief Seattle took this to its logical conclusion when he said, “There is no death, only a change of worlds.”

Like quantum physicists, cave dwellers and modern tribal peoples believe that the stone walls of caves are more like membranes between this world and that of the ancestors. So, placing a painting of one’s own handprint on top of an ancestor’s creates a link where one is able to touch and pass through to a kind of historic continuum to the ancestral chain of being. Drawing an animal is believed to have been an appeal on the part of hunters to ask permission of their quarry’s spirit prior to hunting for food.

The representations of animals in the Upper Paleolithic caves are so realistic that they seem to breathe, especially in torchlight and placed as they often are on outcrops that enhance their shape—the artists were obviously very familiar at close range to their subject and their depictions are in many cases without peer in the millennia that have transpired since. No less than the like of Picasso testified to this when, after seeing the extinct Altamira bison created 15,000 thousand years previously, remarked: “ None of us could paint like that.”

This raises how art enters the picture, which brings us to principle number four:

4. WHAT IS WORK TO ONE CAVEMAN IS ANOTHER MAN’S ART

In his illuminating book on cognitive archeology, “Shamanism and the Ancient Mind”, James L. Pearson says: “From the first discovery of prehistoric painting at Altamira to the stunning finds at Grotte Cosquer and Chauvet Cave in the 1990’s, researchers have tried to uncover the meaning of this Ice Age art and the function of the painted caves.” The field of study that undertakes to explore the caves and other sites associated with such decoration is called “Rock Art,” a label that, while helpful for academics, presents some semantic problems when looked at with the tribal eye.

The basic issue is not only how to define art—a challenge we’ll leave to the experts for now—but according to Steven Mithen in “The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art and Science”: “…the definition of art is culturally specific. Indeed many societies who create splendid rock paintings do not have a word for art in their language.”

Is “rock art” art if the producers didn’t think so? For most of the 20th century, prevailing wisdom associated cave art with hunting magic. Others scholars and researchers like Mircea Eliade, Joan Halifax, Weston La Barre, Andreas Lommel, and David Whitley suggested that Lascaux, Les Trois Freres and other rock art sites depicted shamans and supernatural helpers.

World-renowned authorities Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams expanded on a preceding neuropsychological model and combined it with ethnography in their 1998 book “The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves”: “The way in which each individual cave was structured and decorated was a unique result of the interaction of four elements: the topography of the cave, its passages, and chambers; the universal functioning of the human nervous system and in particular, how it behaves in altered states; the social conditions, cosmologies, and religious beliefs of the different times at which a cave was used; and lastly, the catalyst—the ways in which individual people and groups of people exploited and manipulated all of these elements for their own purposes.”

The most fascinating connection that is made in the neuropsychological model is between the actual symbolic elements in rock art and phosphene action that takes place in the human eye, whether during altered or natural states. Just rub your eyes and you’ll see these shapes and signs that are created by the firing of the optic nerve. Many are universal forms like jigsaws, dots, rakes, and spirals that appear throughout rock art sites across millennia and all over the world. The question then becomes how much of what we see is conscious and how much is not?

In this view, what is considered as representational art has a connection to the ability to create symbols with intention, and turns creative expression into an index as to the level of consciousness of a specific culture at a particular time and space. Cognitive archeology says that the production of representational art requires a certain brain capacity that sees outside itself. When I’ve taken tribal people from different cultures to see the rock art sites in the local Santa Monica Mountains, they are always careful to offer interpretations circumscribed by their own culture. “To us,” they start with a disclaimer, “these paintings represent clan symbols.” But, they are always deferential about the meaning, intent or purpose for the tribe who created them. This perspective leads to our next principle:

5. SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR

As Freud famously said. The bottom line in terms of my own experience at rock art sites is that you can’t dismiss that some of paintings and petroglyphs were just doodling and a sort of tribal version of “Kilroy Was Here” message. Maybe it was just a fine day around the water hole where hunter-gatherers had the luxury of some extra time on their hands and thought to memorialize their afternoon with their mark. So, we have to consider that some of the “art” may have not been conceived of as representational or symbolic at all, but just as either functional—as with hunting magic—or doodles that were pleasing to the eye but meant nothing more. But, one of the manias of our scientific age is to attempt to find a rational way to explain everything.

One of the difficulties in rock art research is that there is no Rosetta Stone handy to decipher pictographs and petroglyphs. Outside of cultures with living traditions of rock art like the Aborigine and San people, it is not straight forward to interpret what they mean. Instead, we are often left with the beautiful problem of confronting meaning ourselves as a primary experience without interpretation—with nothing between us and the original maker of the markings—and a rare occurrence that we should treasure in this media immersive world that interprets our experience of the world to death for us in over three thousand advertisements, logos, and consumer messages a day.

So, what may be art to us with historical distance from the circumstances and cultural context in which cave paintings were created, they may have had quite a functional purpose to those who originally produced it, whether it was to evoke the ancestors, supernatural or animal powers or clan territory. My take is that even though the scientific method and was born out of the Age of Reason and out of rejection of religious belief, it still is based in part on fear of the Unknown. The search for meaning is one way to moderate fear, leading naturally to our next precept:

6. DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train. One of the most impressive thing about caves is the kind of absolute darkness that we ordinarily never experience. To enter one, you often have to deal with fear. On some primordial level, you feel as if you are leaving the lighted world to say nothing of carrying along the cultural baggage of the collective unconscious associated with the netherworld.

Imagine what it must have been like to descend into one of these places as a twelve-year-old initiate in Upper Paleolithic society, led by the most frightening person in the tribe—the shaman—and making your way by hook and by crook, on your hands and knees, in the mud and underground streams, listening to the drip-drip-drip of water seeping from the land above mixed with the strange sounds of nether dwelling life forms and suddenly seeing forms of animals and other strange shapes come alive with lighting of the shaman’s lamp. It probably was an experience that would give religion to any one of us.

A recent book by Martin Lindstrom called “Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy” features excellent material relating to the use of fMRI technology, but one finding, in particular, is quite surprising. The results of fMRI scans have demonstrated a connection between religion and consumer behavior. Apparently, experiments showed that the part of the brain activated during religious ceremonies and experiences is the same as the region which is active during shopping, watching commercials, and gazing at corporate logos.

Ad Age reported on April 6 about findings from the New York Buyology Symposium that presented brain scanning data making correlations between “cult-like brands” such as Harley Davidson and Ferrari and the emotional drivers associated with believers in the world’s largest religion, Christianity.

Dr. Gregory Berns is a psychiatrist who is also a leading authority on neuroeconomics, and biomedical engineering. Neuroeconomics is a study that combines neurology, psychology and economics and looks at understanding how individuals and groups make decisions, take risks, and experience rewards. One of the primary tools that they use is fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) which studies brain response by correlating specific neuron firing in the brain with the decision making process.

Berns’ new book, "Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How To Think Differently," reveals the limitations that the fear response places on creativity and innovation. In an extended interview in the current edition of Super Consciousness magazine, he says, “The importance of the distinctions in how each of us sees the world cannot be underestimated…perception is not something that is immutably hardwired into the brain.” He profiles recent findings that show how we are capable of transforming the way we perceive life and can redirect neurological firing. It’s not an easy feat, requiring extraordinary mental training and energy, but the idea stands as one of the fundamental principles of neuroeconomics.

According to Berns: “…one of the brain’s primary survival mechanisms is conserving energy. The brain does this by limiting energy expenditure during normal everyday awareness…for most people, though, breaking out of the comfort zone of their energy conservative perceptions is often a fearful proposition.”

He goes on to say that fear limits our ability to be creative and is a huge impediment to innovation. Similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent treatment in “Outliers”, Berns sees the great innovators as outsiders and iconoclasts who are able to face risk, “but cognitively reframe (such situations) so as to estimate some kind of likelihood of success or failure to make a decision.” He calls it “the optimism bias,” which allows them to “downplay negative scenarios” as opposed to buy into the uncertainty or ambiguity that are at the root of primal fear. It’s interesting that structural ambiguity is a feature of many video game design as described, for example, by Jim Gasperini in “Structural Ambiguity: An Emerging Interactive Aesthetic” in “Information Design” edited by Robert Jacobsen.

Economists call one kind of uncertainty risk where there is a possibility of success or failure, but one can estimate the odds and determine some likelihood of the outcome. Neuroscience indicates that the fear response is generated when we don’t have a complete picture or a state of ambiguity. The current financial crisis has inspired fear, according to Berns, because we don’t have all the facts about how deep it is and how far it’s going to go.

In a May Atlantic article about the financial crisis, Cody Lundin says, “Risk-taking went over the edge. We are inventing something new. We’re very afraid. We know from the Depression that people who lived through it didn’t change their mentality for the rest of their lives. They were sewing socks. They refused to take a lot of chances. My sense is that it will take 10 or 20 years to find that spark of risk-taking in people again.”

The way that we approach risk is at the basis of strategy. One of the things that our hunter-gatherer ancestors learned from animals is low risk behavior. Berns describes it as, “…head in the sand, everyone in the bunker, cut back spending, hoard what I have, and wait for the storm to pass. That is a very instinctual response and again, goes back to the survival instinct. When you are afraid, you tend to retreat and hoard what you have. Animals that have the capacity to think through the situation just wait it out. That is a low risk strategy and will probably work to maintain your status quo, which is fine if that is what you want. The innovator sees everyone else doing that, and it is precisely in those circumstances that it makes the most sense for them to take risks.”

Fear is, therefore, not the optimal operating system. In “The Science of Fear”, Daniel Gardner demonstrates how many irrational fears are based on the way that humans miscalculate risks. To be creative, perhaps innovate, and ultimately, to succeed, we need to transcend fear of the cave of the mind. In one of his notebooks, Leonardo Da Vinci wrote: “Drawn by my eager wish, desirous of seeing the great confusion of the various strange forms created by ingenious nature, I wandered for some time among the shadowed cliffs and came to the entrance of a great cavern. I remained before it for a while stupefied and ignorant of the existence of such a thing. With my back bent and my left hand resting on my knee, and shading my eyes with my right, with lids lowered and closed, and often bending this way and that to see whether I could discern anything within. But this was denied me by the great darkness inside and after I stayed a while, there arose in me two things: fear and desire. Fear, because of the menacing dark cave, and desire to see whether there were any miraculous thing within.”

Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending argue in their new book, “The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution” that recent genetic change has been far more expansive than the traditional “great leap forward” that scientists believed defined human beings some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago. This was the period which also gave us the birth of artistic expression with examples of the so-called Venus sculptures appearing 40,000 to 60,000 years ago and a flute dated at some 54,000 years. The actual beginnings of art are the subject of much debate and estimates can range up to 100,000 years ago. What is agreed on is that a creative explosion took place around 30,000 years ago, the date of the Chauvet Cave and amazingly, in full development. Whether Cochran and Harpending’s theory has validity or not, I still think that the invention of fire is pretty hard to top with language and art a close second and third. The nature of images, whether art or otherwise, leads to our final principle:

7. THINK BEYOND WORDS

Maybe it all comes down to what Fred Barnard once said in 1921 when he coined the expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” He was speaking about the signs on the sides of streetcars. No matter, if the cave mind operating system has a purpose for us today, it’s because it drives us with mysterious images to think beyond words, to face our fears, and find consciousness in the stars that light up our brains.

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…”