rock & roll

One of the things about blogs that’s great is that I can throw down an opinion and nobody realllly gets to say a thing about it. People are welcomed to not like it, and/or not even read it, and it doesn’t phase me either way, because for me, the writing is the prize, and that often happens weeks before anyone reads what I’ve written. I’ve gotten into some abstract spiritual things in the past, and today is no different, really.

Rock & Roll.

Rock & roll, as much as it’s kind of a specific thing, is also not. It with a bunch of rebellious kids playing loud & fast music and racing hot rods and as much as it’s been packaged and sold back to us, and diluted a little bit each time, there are people who still dig deep into the back pages of what it really is and was and was supposed to become, and who truly embody the swagger and the spirit that was forged in the fires of Hell decades ago. These rock&rollers… their numbers are incredibly low. Lower than you think. They dispense with the slickness of the repackaging and leave that to the engineer, producers, and marketing teams who in-turn try to shoehorn these square pegs into round holes… and it kinda works, but in the end, the art and the artist win against the marketing teams.

See? Abstract. I told you.

Let’s start at the beginning – and no, we’re not going to start with Elvis Presley or Ike Turner or Sam Phillips, or even Buddy Holly. We’re going to start with Jerry Lee Lewis.

Jerry Lee was an absolute motherfucker. he was a phenomenal piano player whose skill is often overlooked and overshadowed by his short-lived and career-destroying marriage to his underaged 2nd cousin. He did his very own thing right until the very end, in spite of most of his performance career being in country music. If ever there was a performer who was unapologetically himself, who flipped the bird to the haters and the fakers right until the day he died, it was Jerry Lee Lewis.

Lemmy Kilmister, singer and bass player for Motorhead, and prompter of my personal motto: “If you think you’re too old to rock & roll then you are” built a reputation on excess of everything – most of all, volume. He wrote, recorded and toured relentlessly kicking off every show with “We are Motorhead and we play Rock & Roll” – an avid fan of early rock & roll by the likes of Chuck Berry and The Beatles, whom he preferred over the Rolling Stones as they were suburban rich kids who didn’t embody ‘the real thing’ in his mind. His defense of the true essence of rock & roll was unwavering as he openly criticised hair metal and nu-metal, and backed up his talk with 23 studio albums and 16 live albums – all after the age of 30.

Iggy Pop. Icon and artist, has released 27 studio albums – some of which are debatably unlistenable – starting with one of the most influential bands ‘The Stooges’ who; by his own account, likely played to less people in their years as a band than currently cite them as an influence. His honesty around the struggle to get The Stooges off the ground, his tumultuous friendship with David Bowie, his time in a mental institution due to his heroin addiction, and his open admission that he’s worked a number of jobs including as a real estate agent in order to continue to release music and art without compromising his artistic integrity, understanding that half-assing his vision is not an option. He’s the only one still alive as I write this, and he released one of his best albums “Every Loser” at the age of 75 in 2023… kicking off the whole record with an absolute pounder that opens with the lyric “I’ve got a dick & 2 balls and that’s more than you all.”

These are 3 examples, and I’m sure people would like me to talk about Dave Grohl or Jack White but in all honesty, they are too young and arguably too business-minded for anyone to really be able to say they “lived it till the end” or some such shit, because it’s not the end for them. There’s still plenty of time for them to water down what they’re doing, and maybe they already have.

I hope that when I am all done on this planet, that people can look back on my body of work and surmise that I did it exactly how it was in me to do. I’m sure many people already don’t like what I’m doing, but I really don’t give a fuck, because they cannot deny that I am doing it with intention, and skillfully, the way it’s in me to do. Maybe they’ll come around and maybe they won’t, but in the end I believe I will be satisfied with that I’ve left behind.