Rock ‘n’ roll is bad for your health, or so local
garage rock band Kennedy wanted us to believe at their Spaceland
show last Thursday night. During their final song, perhaps due to
pressure brought on by the wild stunts of his predecessors, the
frontman of Kennedy (who announced that the names of all three band
members were Kennedy as well) proceeded to pound an entire 40 ounce
bottle of Absolut Vodka.
But so what? Rock stages have certainly seen worse. Ozzy
Osbourne chewed the heads off small winged mammals, Sid Vicious
liked to draw on himself with razors, and Iggy Pop used everything
from broken glass to peanut butter to fresh vomit as fair game for
a good live set. As far as legends go in rock ‘n’ roll
or college night life, Kennedy wasn’t making history. More
likely, he was just doing his job.
Still, when he dropped the empty bottle from a dramatically
outstretched hand and grabbed his bass to join the band just in
time to finish the last chorus, I looked at my watch. Rock
‘n’ roll hero or not, he was a skinny guy, and I gave
him two minutes to hit the floor. We were all a little surprised to
see him make it through the song, and then quite elegantly make it
off the stage.
Except there was an encore. Kennedy bounced right back, sang
about something which sounded roughly like “Chunky
Monkey” and didn’t miss a beat. It was a great encore.
In fact, maybe too great of an encore for a skinny rock monkey who
put enough 80 proof in his system to fill a goldfish bowl not 10
minutes before. When he finished and walked offstage in good enough
shape to bring home to one’s mother, my friend couldn’t
help but investigate. She asked him on the spot whether he had
faked it, and reported back two things. His response: “Would
I lie to you, baby?” and the smell of his breath: according
to her, absolutely not of vodka.
So, granted that anything’s possible and that the man may
have a tolerance level of a gorilla, I’ll let the reader
decide just what was being drunk.
But I left the club that night with a scrunched forehead.
Indeed, the very nature of the word stage, the home of rock
‘n’ roll mayhem, refers to the verb “to
stage,” meaning “to fake” or “to
act.” My Shakespeare professor reminded me recently that one
who goes to the theater is paying to be deluded or tricked. The
goal of the actors on stage is to momentarily convince the audience
of a two-hour fantasy, and thus provide escape from the tensions of
every day reality. I don’t think a rock show is so
different.
Still, when Ozzy Osbourne eats a bat, he eats a bat. For diehard
fans of rock ‘n’ roll, who refuse to digest anything
MTV-made, their first defense of the often raw and gritty music is
that it’s real, and the emotions that are played out on the
stage or life of the rocker bring real consequences. But when
Britney Spears gets married on the notion of a joke, her incubated
world of wealth and fame allows her to annul it the very next
day.
I’m not defending the unhealthy choices some rock
musicians have made, as unfortunately, many of the genre’s
greatest have obliterated themselves this way. But what was once
rock ‘n’ roll is being endlessly and emptily copied by
a thousand bands hoping to be the next Big Thing.
But the fact still remains that what’s not original and
what’s not honest is not rock ‘n’ roll. So maybe
we need to kill the whole thing altogether, in order not to lose
what was once great about it. Maybe it’s time for whatever
created rock ‘n’ roll in the first place to rescramble
its palate, and spit out something as equally revolutionary and
magical as when the blues picked up its pace and got the teenagers
dancing.