Every so often, no matter how far I stray, something will happen to remind me I still give a massive hoot about rock rock rock and roll. At least about those parts of it I still give a hoot about.
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I signed on for the event mainly ’cause I had some things to read–a riff on ashes and the Ganges written when I heard George’s would be spilled there, some of them anyway, and a piece by a friend of mine ’bout her family’s Thanksgiving with George in 1970, when his strict vegetarianism couldn’t stop him from eating turkey served by her dying mom (he didn’t even wince): no way would this saintly s.o.b. think of spoiling her day. To a greater extent than I coulda guessed, reading ’em stoked me, really did, and I tossed myself with great zeal into the ongoing goofiness of the evening. Somebody lit incense (“George’s funeral pyre”) while off in a corner a sitarist noodled through a generic raga. Bands visited, celebrated, denigrated George’s musical oeuvre with a wide gamut of agendas, from cheesiness and kitsch to total solemnity.
Every time anyone did a decent turn on a tune I cared about (“You Like Me Too Much,” “Blue Jay Way,” “I Need You”), I felt wow, and I yelled “YEAH!” and once or twice (“Piggies,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) I actually sang along. There was plenty I didn’t recognize (having unplugged from the repertoire somewhere around “Crackerbox Palace”), and one band flat-out made me sick, ending “Isn’t It a Pity” with a big chunk of “Hey Jude”–what a travesty. When the chunk kept goin’, I stood up and yelled, “FUCK YOU! GO HOME!”
Hey, I made a fucking fool of myself.
The much-vaunted rock & roll 50s, for all they did to salvage the human condition, staggering on what surely seemed a terminal gimp, lasted only about two years–from Elvis’s first appearance on Ed Sullivan in ’56 to not much later than his desecration by the Army. Rock was dead in the water before Buddy Holly went down…you could even make a case for its being over by late spring ’57, when Elvis cut “Teddy Bear.” Yeah, sure, there were things you’d get on the radio through the early 60s that still made it–“Do You Love Me?” by the Contours, “Louie Louie,” “Two Faces Have I”–but trust me, rock & roll as such was no longer happening…was no longer a factor in the world.
Hey! “Thank You Girl,” “Yes It Is,” “I’ll Be Back,” “Tell Me What You See”…these songs FORMED my romantic overkill; etched it in my stones. My sense of boy-girl lust and frenzy, twist and squirm, hasn’t budged an inch in 37 years. (I wouldn’t have it any other way.)
