A crowd of 60 or so gathered at the Sunset Tavern on a recent
Thursday, jostling to get closer to the night’s first band. Among the
audience were the usual city suspects—rockabillies and indie
rockers and hipsters—as well as a pack of polo-shirted,
white-sneakered civilians looking like youngish suburban parents out
for a kid-free night on the town.
Turned out that’s exactly what they were, though they didn’t leave
their kids at home; their kids were the main attraction. The Lonely H,
five 18-year-olds with long, wavy hair, worn-in T-shirts, and faded
bell-bottom jeans, stepped out of 1971 and onto the stage. The
bell-bottoms they wore were their dads’. And the music they
played—from the first Yes-inflected organ riff to a climactic
Thin Lizzy cover—belonged to their parents, too.
Welcome to classic rock played by kids born the year Straight
Outta Compton was released.
Can it be? Isn’t “classic rock” the opposite of “alive and well”?
The quality of their music aside—though they do Southern-soul
prog rock, or maybe post-emo classic rock, surprisingly well—the
Lonely H set in motion many questions. Is classic rock an era or a
style? Does it have to be 30 years old or can you make it today? To
what degree is radio responsible for it? And why does the term bring to
mind Led Zeppelin for some and for others, Styx?
Classic rock is a ghetto of the painfully familiar. By definition,
it’s old, revered, canonized, trapped in the amber of nostalgia. You
might call Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band—released in 1967, the first real, true, cohesive
album—its seed (though you might call Sgt. Pepper’s the
seed for album rock and orchestral pop and the concept album, too).
Prior to that record, radio play and record sales were based on
singles, hits bought and played one at a time. Conversely, you could
call Saturday Night Fever classic rock’s doom: By 1977, with
the popularity of disco and dance-floor singles (not to mention general
punk-fueled anarchy), the era of hour-long, conceptual albums was on
the wane. The canon of classic rock arose during the decade in between,
inspiring a spectrum of moods and drugs and haircuts. Today we have
access to all of it—the music, the fashion, the
drugs—pretty much instantly.
The radio definition is limited—turn to any classic-rock
station in America (the genrefication is a distinctly American
phenomenon) and you’re gonna hear the same few songs by the same 200 or
so bands, played over and over, as if there were no other music left on
earth, let alone other songs by those same bands.
Classic albums are a little bit different—they can
come from any genre and any era, but as it turns out, it’s mostly stuff
from the classic-rock years that enjoys classic-album status. The
further we get from that classic-rock era, the less the likelihood for
an album to be deemed classic: The more genres that emerge, the more
splintered our listening habits, the less likelihood for consensus.
Thanks to endless options, there might never be a classic album
again.
Think about it: Has there been a certifiably classic rock album
since 2000? As much as it hurts to admit it, the answer is no. There’s
been plenty of good rock, some of which we’ll still be listening to in
20 years, and there’s been plenty of pop, most of which we won’t.
There’s been a lot of classic hiphop, but that’s hiphop.
Arcade Fire? Neon Bible hasn’t sold 300,000 copies. Justin
Timberlake? Over seven million copies of
FutureSex/LoveSounds—mostly on the strength of two
songs, which will be forgotten by this time next year. Eminem’s The
Marshall Mathers LP sold some seven million albums, and Fear
of a Black Planet is a multiplatinum landmark, but again, that’s
hiphop. The last rock album to make the cut was Radiohead’s OK
Computer, which has sold over three million copies, and that came
out in 1997. Blame the internet, blame hiphop, blame the kids for
making crappy music or the adults for having crappy taste—they’re
all at fault. But more than anything, blame the rate at which we
consume music.
What will happen to classic rock 20 years from now? The style will
remain open while the canon will be closed. The transition away from
the ghettoization that the mass marketplace requires—from Clear
Channel–approved playlists and Best Buy–sized
retailers—has already begun. Eventually both will be rendered
irrelevant by personalized, niche stations and on-demand stores. For
whatever’s left of the mainstream, classic rock will be the same ghetto
it is now. Lucky teenagers will discover the songs their grandparents
loved, but they won’t experience Morrison Hotel and Dark
Side of the Moon as the rites of passage they were to earlier
generations.
At least the records are still around. For the Lonely H, that’s
enough.
“We have recessed in time to almost exclusively classic rock,” says
bassist Johnny Whitman. “It seemed that rock was a religious
movement—or spiritual, how about that? The Beatles—people
were crying at their shows. Elvis was censored. Who fills arenas these
days? Kenny Chesney. Top 40 back then was right on.”
In the right hands, to the right ears, classic records continue to
be a revelation, the Dead Sea Scrolls that prove the existence of a
much groovier past. Nostalgia is strong—almost a living,
breathing thing, even for those who never lived in the golden days.
It’s also fair game to appropriate. If the Lonely H want to be classic
rock—if they dress like it and sound like it—why not call
them classic rock? They’re simply changing the definition.
“It’s a pretty sweet term,” Whitman says. “We’re already ingrained
if our music’s considered ‘classic.'”
He’s got a point, if only a semantic one. The notion of “instant
classic,” so long considered an oxymoron, might be an actuality in the
iPod era. Ironically, the Lonely H cherish the past exactly because the
digitized, downloadable present feels so soulless.
Not just musically, but socially. There’s a perception of the ’70s
as a font of good music and good times that’s very appealing to
teenagers on the cusp of starting off real lives. “You didn’t get MIPs
back then; the laws were more lax,” Whitman says. “Pure life, more pure
music. It was more of a lifestyle.”
Twenty years from now, a new set of teenagers will jack into an
unearthed copy of Hair, Lonely H’s newest album, and find
nostalgia for an era the band wasn’t a part of. Secondhand nostalgia,
sure, but it’s gonna age so well. 