eruption
The exact moment was January 3, 1984 – that was the day that Bobby Gutley realized that Rock and Roll was dead. I was 15 years old, sitting Indian style in the middle of Gutley's living room on shag carpeting that smelled slightly like cat urine. Gutley, myself and just about every other kid I knew were glued to a TV set at that moment, in basements, living rooms and bedrooms all across town, awaiting the premiere of Van Halen’s latest video ‘Jump' on Mtv.
My friendship with Gutley went back to grade school, not only had we played baseball and football together, and shot BB guns at each other's heads, but we had spent a thousand afternoons peddling our bikes over crooked pavement and cracked sidewalks, through gravel back alley short cuts, puddle hopping our way to the snack shop/filling station a half mile across town. We listened to Ted Nugent and Foghat on the jukebox and oogled cheap porno magazines that we stashed inside our Mad magazines as we ate hot dogs and chips, and drank Cokes. We were from the same social-economic strata: poor, small town white boys who lived on the run-down side of the tracks. Neither one of us had a “present' father. Gutley's old man was a truck driver who had been on the road since Gutley was a little kid and then one day just never came back. Gutley's mom worked two jobs and never had the time to find a replacement dad. My situation wasn't any better, and in fact this was a pretty common arrangement in our neck of the woods. The divorce rate in America had doubled every single year from 1965 to 1975 – and all these divorces had created a subculture of “latchkey” kids, kids who came home after school each afternoon to an empty house. We were left to fend for ourselves. We could have turned to drugs or alcohol or to the Bible or cable tv. But Gutley and I turned to Rock and Roll. That was our religion. It created our ethos. There was a certain way of doing things, there were standards that, if you followed, would get you through anything in this universe. Rock and Roll provided the code, through the cues and clues and attitudes found on the vinyl records, on the cassette tapes and 8-track tapes. The album covers, the electric sounds recorded in analog, the lyrics, the liner notes, the Rock magazine articles or late night music shows - it all revealed and reinforced this Rock ethos to us. And we believed in this ethos with as much passion and certainty as any devoted religious zealot believes in the wisdom of the Lord. Neil Young sang our anthem, “Hey, hey, my, my. Rock and Roll will never die.” But now, sitting in front of the TV in Gutley's living room, about to witness Van Halen's "Jump," the Rock and Roll ethos that we had been raised on was on the verge of collapse.
Gutley cranked the volume on his television set to the point of numbed distortion. The Mtv ‘World premiere video’ logo dissolved into the screen and the boys from Van Halen – Gutley's last hope for Classic Rock – jumped out. Van Halen was Gutley’s band. He had three Van Halen concert shirts, he had Van Halen patches covering his jean jacket, he drew the Van Halen logo on his notebooks at school, he had a Van Halen poster scotch-taped to his bedroom door, and he had every Van Halen album ever recorded within arm’s reach of his record player. But... it had been nearly two years since Van Halen’s last release and the Rock landscape had changed dramatically. How much it had changed was about to become painfully obvious as the belated members of Van Halen jumped to life on the TV screen and began striking their calculated rock poses. Something was wrong. First of all Eddie Van Halen, the guitar god of our generation, was fingering out some nursery rhyme chord progression on— what the fuck!—an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer? Eddie had this goofy, regurgitated grin smeared across his face as if he had just farted in a crowded elevator. Then wham-bam! Out pops the spandex-clad Diamond David Lee Roth bounding across the screen in his un-laced hi-tops giving us all a head-cheerleader “We’ve got spirit, Yes we do, we’ve got spirit how bout you?!?” leg-splitting high kick followed by some sort of karate-kid backward ass flip thing that was shown in slow motion. Every other shot in fact was a glamour shot of David Lee Roth doing cartwheels or fluffing his hair in a gesture that immediately brought to mind a cheesy Shampoo commercial in which a female hair model made the exact same gesture while singing “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair!” What the fuck is this? This wasn’t right. This was wrong! And not only were they looking and acting like total douche wads, but the song was for shit! Doot-doot-doot-doot. Doot-doot—deet-dah-dah-doot. “Jump! Might as well jump!”
The disappointment in Gutley’s face couldn't have been more clear. His eye brows furled, the edges of his mouth took a downward turn. The sprinkle of Alfred E. Newmanesque freckles on his nose seemed to fade away. He suddenly appeared very old. “Is that it?” his expression said. Is that all that our generation of Rock has to offer? I knew what Gutley wanted. He wanted Pete Townsend smashing his guitar across his amp, he wanted John Lennon saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, he wanted Jimmy Page pulling out a violin bow and butt fucking his guitar with it, he wanted Jimi Hendrix bowing down in front of his flaming guitar and giving praise to the Gods above for blessing him with the calling. But what had we gotten? Synthesizers! Synthesizers and lip-synching and drum machines and spandex and cartwheels… And M fucking TV.
M fucking TV. Maybe M fucking TV was just the scapegoat, maybe it was just a symptom and not the disease. But if you were a teenager in the early 1980s the one thing you remembered was not what you were doing when the hostages in Lebanon were released or what you were doing when Oliver North testified to Congress about illegal arms deals. What you remember is the first time you ever saw Mtv. I was as guilty of this fascination with Mtv as any. It was late 1981 and my mother’s second husband Joe had just splurged 9 dollars a month to provide the family with cable tv. Every night after that, Joe would pass out on the sofa with a Pabst Blue Ribbon clutched in one hand and the remote control clutched to the other. Then one night, bored with Marty Stouffer's Wild America reruns, I surgically removed the remote from Joe's hand and started channel surfing (with only 13 cable stations available, surfing the TV waves wasn’t all that daunting). When I clicked the channel to Mtv my jaw just dropped. The first thing I saw was a split screen image of this spiky-haired, fair-skinned doll woman (Laurie Anderson) singing “O Superman” to the beeping sound of a digital telephone dial tone. Beep-beeep-beep-beep. I couldn't take my eyes off it – “What is this?” But if that wasn’t baffling enough, what immediately followed was this pasty-faced, pouty-lipped Euro-dude with a blond, ice cream swirly of a hair do (and who was dressed kinda like a pirate from outer space) who was wheezing about at the funhouse mirrors in what seemed to have been the Men's room on the Millennium Falcon, hugging himself as he sang “And I raaaaa-an, I ran so far aw-aaaay”. Spacier still was the heaven-ish, chiming, mesmerizing echo-effect guitar riff ripping up the sound space all around him. “What the hell is going on here?” Had Martians invaded the frickin planet and taken over the TV waves? Had some future race of humans found a way to transport images back in time
through satellite technology?
Whatever it was, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. But, maybe to fully understand how alien Mtv was at that time, you had to have lived through the 1970's...and lived through them in a small town because small town 1970's was a place and time where the old weird America still hung out. It was a time and place before corporatization dominated the culture, before the uniformity of thought and action that dictates the 21st century's politically correct reality had taken over the culture. In old, weird America life was like a sepia-tone hued film that was slightly blurred, slightly out of focus, slightly off, slightly rusted. Small town 1970s was a place and time where people didn't take much effort in deciding what clothes to wear or even whether they should comb their hair or not. It was a time and place that was becoming extinct.
By the end of the 1970's small town Americans were living in a country that had lost its first war ever (Vietnam) and whose very foundation of government had been crippled by Watergate. It was a country that was in the throes of an economy that was so bad that new words (like stagflation) had to be created to describe it. After 25 years of post WWII prosperity, small town 1970's was facing inflation, stagnation, increasing unemployment. We had an energy crisis, a hostage crisis, oil embargoes, we had large corporate chemical companies pumping cancer-filled smog into the environment and toxic-infested factories pumping industrial waste into our waterways at such a rate that it was literally causing entire rivers to ignite into flames. We read of white flight, a phenomenon that led to a neglect of the inner-cities and turned urban neighborhoods into petri dishes of crime, corruption and decay. New York City had actually gone bankrupt and had to ask the Federal government for a bail out. In a small town, we didn't know what to think about that. But the stories of tens of thousands of draft dodgers and street criminals forming an underground population of shady characters with fake identifications who were living in cults or bouncing from safe house to safe house was concerning. It all added up to what the peanut farmer from Georgia (i.e. President Jimmy Carter) called a “crisis of confidence”. Everyone seemed kinda bummed out on some level, or else drugged up and out of touch, sitting around in lawn chairs, drinking, smoking, wondering what they were gonna do. Then, in an election with the lowest voter turn-out in history, our apathetic response was to elect some bumbling, brill-creamed, old time Hollywood B-movie actor who was best known for co-starring with a chimpanzee and saber-rattling against hippies and Communist.
But then, in the mist all this confusion, crisis and malaise, came M fucking TV, a window to a land where things were different – an alternative universe where things were bright and beautiful, colorful, obtuse, upbeat and just plain fucking weird. A shiny, cool, new wave of artists from Europe with mathematically honed “post-punk” sounds were just beginning to overpopulate the pop charts in Europe and marching toward America in the next British Invasion. Their mission? To provide American teens their soundtrack for the 80s. And Mtv was there to broadcast it.
It had taken less than two summers, for nearly every teenager in the country, including those in my small town, to become totally infected by the Mtv virus. In those two years neither I nor most any other teen across the land could take their eyes off of Mtv. What could be of greater fascination in the life of a 13 year old who had just survived the 70's, than seeing flashy-attired pop musicians queer-dancing about under flashing, multi-colored lights in neon-tubed, disco-mirrored expressionistic sets filled with the mise en scene abstractions of futuristic sculpture and pop art designs – and all to the sweet, sugar-synthed sounds of electro-pop, precision that was riddled with rhythmic dance beats that permeating the air like zig zagging lasers shot from an arcade machine? AmeriTeens were mesmerized, hypnotized. So much so that no one had paid that much attention to the fact that in those two years, Rock had forever changed. By the premiere of Van Halen's “Jump” video Classic Rock had been replaced by two equally destructive yet diabolically opposed forces: First, New Wave Synthesizer Pop, followed quickly by Hair Metal. In the high schools, and in the shopping malls, at the pinball hangouts, and on the radio. There was no stopping these two forces. And then when it seemed that things could not have gotten any worse, here came Michael Jackson. And just like that Mtv was ruining everything. And I mean everything.
I looked at Gutley. He resembled a hard-boiled egg about to explode. Literally explode. The Van Halen video had awoken a primal instinct in him. The look on his face was disgust, utter disgust. He had had enough: enough of the jerry-curled, glittery, soulless twits with their one white glove and their 'moon walking' across the screen, enough of the permed-haired, hipster-vested snoot-worthies who crooned across the ballroom dance floor singing "Everybody wang chung tonight", enough of the caked-on, make-up faced, chinless turds in parachute pants singing “Shout, shout! let it all out”, enough of the poodle-groomed, guy-liner infested Pop Metal poseurs singing power ballads that were polluted with ridiculously formulaic guitar solos and pussy-ass guitar riffs. But most of all, he had had enough of what Mtv had done to Rock music: it was turning our Rock prophets into sideshow barkers and trained monkeys, replacing balls to the wall guitar riffs with synthesized disco, it was spoon feeding American teens lollipops and bubble gum over meat and potatoes. Maybe this shit was acceptable to the typical high school robots, but for Bobby Gutley a line had been crossed. Something went 'snap' inside his head. This was supposed to be an important moment, an important album, an important song by the best hard rock band in the world. But instead...we got served this shit sandwich. It just wasn't right. There was something missing. It didn’t feel like it should. And it wasn’t just the music, it seemed like something huge, not just Classic rock, but something bigger had died. Sure, maybe Gutley should have seen this coming – guitar rock had been dying a long, slow death for many years now—even before this video, even before Eddie Van Halen had been pimped out to play guitar on Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat it’ just a year earlier. That should have been the tip off to Gutley. Yet he just couldn't bring himself to admit it. That was a fluke, right? But now, the 'Jump” video was here, and that was no fluke – that was straight-up bull shit being rubbed right into his face. He stood up, fists clenched and stomped off to his bedroom, shredding the Van Halen poster from his door along the way and throwing it to the ground in one fluid swoop. “This is bullshit,” his gesture said. And just like that, the Classic Rock Era was dead. Now there was only one thing left to do.
©2006 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved
Gutley cranked the volume on his television set to the point of numbed distortion. The Mtv ‘World premiere video’ logo dissolved into the screen and the boys from Van Halen – Gutley's last hope for Classic Rock – jumped out. Van Halen was Gutley’s band. He had three Van Halen concert shirts, he had Van Halen patches covering his jean jacket, he drew the Van Halen logo on his notebooks at school, he had a Van Halen poster scotch-taped to his bedroom door, and he had every Van Halen album ever recorded within arm’s reach of his record player. But... it had been nearly two years since Van Halen’s last release and the Rock landscape had changed dramatically. How much it had changed was about to become painfully obvious as the belated members of Van Halen jumped to life on the TV screen and began striking their calculated rock poses. Something was wrong. First of all Eddie Van Halen, the guitar god of our generation, was fingering out some nursery rhyme chord progression on— what the fuck!—an Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer? Eddie had this goofy, regurgitated grin smeared across his face as if he had just farted in a crowded elevator. Then wham-bam! Out pops the spandex-clad Diamond David Lee Roth bounding across the screen in his un-laced hi-tops giving us all a head-cheerleader “We’ve got spirit, Yes we do, we’ve got spirit how bout you?!?” leg-splitting high kick followed by some sort of karate-kid backward ass flip thing that was shown in slow motion. Every other shot in fact was a glamour shot of David Lee Roth doing cartwheels or fluffing his hair in a gesture that immediately brought to mind a cheesy Shampoo commercial in which a female hair model made the exact same gesture while singing “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair!” What the fuck is this? This wasn’t right. This was wrong! And not only were they looking and acting like total douche wads, but the song was for shit! Doot-doot-doot-doot. Doot-doot—deet-dah-dah-doot. “Jump! Might as well jump!”
The disappointment in Gutley’s face couldn't have been more clear. His eye brows furled, the edges of his mouth took a downward turn. The sprinkle of Alfred E. Newmanesque freckles on his nose seemed to fade away. He suddenly appeared very old. “Is that it?” his expression said. Is that all that our generation of Rock has to offer? I knew what Gutley wanted. He wanted Pete Townsend smashing his guitar across his amp, he wanted John Lennon saying the Beatles were bigger than Jesus, he wanted Jimmy Page pulling out a violin bow and butt fucking his guitar with it, he wanted Jimi Hendrix bowing down in front of his flaming guitar and giving praise to the Gods above for blessing him with the calling. But what had we gotten? Synthesizers! Synthesizers and lip-synching and drum machines and spandex and cartwheels… And M fucking TV.
M fucking TV. Maybe M fucking TV was just the scapegoat, maybe it was just a symptom and not the disease. But if you were a teenager in the early 1980s the one thing you remembered was not what you were doing when the hostages in Lebanon were released or what you were doing when Oliver North testified to Congress about illegal arms deals. What you remember is the first time you ever saw Mtv. I was as guilty of this fascination with Mtv as any. It was late 1981 and my mother’s second husband Joe had just splurged 9 dollars a month to provide the family with cable tv. Every night after that, Joe would pass out on the sofa with a Pabst Blue Ribbon clutched in one hand and the remote control clutched to the other. Then one night, bored with Marty Stouffer's Wild America reruns, I surgically removed the remote from Joe's hand and started channel surfing (with only 13 cable stations available, surfing the TV waves wasn’t all that daunting). When I clicked the channel to Mtv my jaw just dropped. The first thing I saw was a split screen image of this spiky-haired, fair-skinned doll woman (Laurie Anderson) singing “O Superman” to the beeping sound of a digital telephone dial tone. Beep-beeep-beep-beep. I couldn't take my eyes off it – “What is this?” But if that wasn’t baffling enough, what immediately followed was this pasty-faced, pouty-lipped Euro-dude with a blond, ice cream swirly of a hair do (and who was dressed kinda like a pirate from outer space) who was wheezing about at the funhouse mirrors in what seemed to have been the Men's room on the Millennium Falcon, hugging himself as he sang “And I raaaaa-an, I ran so far aw-aaaay”. Spacier still was the heaven-ish, chiming, mesmerizing echo-effect guitar riff ripping up the sound space all around him. “What the hell is going on here?” Had Martians invaded the frickin planet and taken over the TV waves? Had some future race of humans found a way to transport images back in time
Whatever it was, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. But, maybe to fully understand how alien Mtv was at that time, you had to have lived through the 1970's...and lived through them in a small town because small town 1970's was a place and time where the old weird America still hung out. It was a time and place before corporatization dominated the culture, before the uniformity of thought and action that dictates the 21st century's politically correct reality had taken over the culture. In old, weird America life was like a sepia-tone hued film that was slightly blurred, slightly out of focus, slightly off, slightly rusted. Small town 1970s was a place and time where people didn't take much effort in deciding what clothes to wear or even whether they should comb their hair or not. It was a time and place that was becoming extinct.
By the end of the 1970's small town Americans were living in a country that had lost its first war ever (Vietnam) and whose very foundation of government had been crippled by Watergate. It was a country that was in the throes of an economy that was so bad that new words (like stagflation) had to be created to describe it. After 25 years of post WWII prosperity, small town 1970's was facing inflation, stagnation, increasing unemployment. We had an energy crisis, a hostage crisis, oil embargoes, we had large corporate chemical companies pumping cancer-filled smog into the environment and toxic-infested factories pumping industrial waste into our waterways at such a rate that it was literally causing entire rivers to ignite into flames. We read of white flight, a phenomenon that led to a neglect of the inner-cities and turned urban neighborhoods into petri dishes of crime, corruption and decay. New York City had actually gone bankrupt and had to ask the Federal government for a bail out. In a small town, we didn't know what to think about that. But the stories of tens of thousands of draft dodgers and street criminals forming an underground population of shady characters with fake identifications who were living in cults or bouncing from safe house to safe house was concerning. It all added up to what the peanut farmer from Georgia (i.e. President Jimmy Carter) called a “crisis of confidence”. Everyone seemed kinda bummed out on some level, or else drugged up and out of touch, sitting around in lawn chairs, drinking, smoking, wondering what they were gonna do. Then, in an election with the lowest voter turn-out in history, our apathetic response was to elect some bumbling, brill-creamed, old time Hollywood B-movie actor who was best known for co-starring with a chimpanzee and saber-rattling against hippies and Communist.
It had taken less than two summers, for nearly every teenager in the country, including those in my small town, to become totally infected by the Mtv virus. In those two years neither I nor most any other teen across the land could take their eyes off of Mtv. What could be of greater fascination in the life of a 13 year old who had just survived the 70's, than seeing flashy-attired pop musicians queer-dancing about under flashing, multi-colored lights in neon-tubed, disco-mirrored expressionistic sets filled with the mise en scene abstractions of futuristic sculpture and pop art designs – and all to the sweet, sugar-synthed sounds of electro-pop, precision that was riddled with rhythmic dance beats that permeating the air like zig zagging lasers shot from an arcade machine? AmeriTeens were mesmerized, hypnotized. So much so that no one had paid that much attention to the fact that in those two years, Rock had forever changed. By the premiere of Van Halen's “Jump” video Classic Rock had been replaced by two equally destructive yet diabolically opposed forces: First, New Wave Synthesizer Pop, followed quickly by Hair Metal. In the high schools, and in the shopping malls, at the pinball hangouts, and on the radio. There was no stopping these two forces. And then when it seemed that things could not have gotten any worse, here came Michael Jackson. And just like that Mtv was ruining everything. And I mean everything.
I looked at Gutley. He resembled a hard-boiled egg about to explode. Literally explode. The Van Halen video had awoken a primal instinct in him. The look on his face was disgust, utter disgust. He had had enough: enough of the jerry-curled, glittery, soulless twits with their one white glove and their 'moon walking' across the screen, enough of the permed-haired, hipster-vested snoot-worthies who crooned across the ballroom dance floor singing "Everybody wang chung tonight", enough of the caked-on, make-up faced, chinless turds in parachute pants singing “Shout, shout! let it all out”, enough of the poodle-groomed, guy-liner infested Pop Metal poseurs singing power ballads that were polluted with ridiculously formulaic guitar solos and pussy-ass guitar riffs. But most of all, he had had enough of what Mtv had done to Rock music: it was turning our Rock prophets into sideshow barkers and trained monkeys, replacing balls to the wall guitar riffs with synthesized disco, it was spoon feeding American teens lollipops and bubble gum over meat and potatoes. Maybe this shit was acceptable to the typical high school robots, but for Bobby Gutley a line had been crossed. Something went 'snap' inside his head. This was supposed to be an important moment, an important album, an important song by the best hard rock band in the world. But instead...we got served this shit sandwich. It just wasn't right. There was something missing. It didn’t feel like it should. And it wasn’t just the music, it seemed like something huge, not just Classic rock, but something bigger had died. Sure, maybe Gutley should have seen this coming – guitar rock had been dying a long, slow death for many years now—even before this video, even before Eddie Van Halen had been pimped out to play guitar on Michael Jackson’s ‘Beat it’ just a year earlier. That should have been the tip off to Gutley. Yet he just couldn't bring himself to admit it. That was a fluke, right? But now, the 'Jump” video was here, and that was no fluke – that was straight-up bull shit being rubbed right into his face. He stood up, fists clenched and stomped off to his bedroom, shredding the Van Halen poster from his door along the way and throwing it to the ground in one fluid swoop. “This is bullshit,” his gesture said. And just like that, the Classic Rock Era was dead. Now there was only one thing left to do.
As he had marched off to his room, tearing the Van Halen poster off his door then slamming the door shut I could hear Gutley grab his red-bodied Stratocaster (dubbed “The Red Devil”). There was a long silence that followed and I thought to myself, “Good God, he's not going to smash it, is he?” And then came the electric jolt of the Red Devil being plugged into its amplifier, which was immediately followed by the familiar siren call of Gutley ripping into it, a wailing cry that the entire house seemed to brace itself for. I looked at Gutley’s sister who had just watched the ‘Jump’ video with us. She looked back with a blank expression and shrugged. I knew I couldn't just sit there. So I made my fateful decision. I walked down the hall slowly, stopping in front of Gutley’s door, just for a second, and without knocking I then slipped inside his room . The ripped Van Halen poster was lying on his floor. Gutley put his hand over the strings of the Red Devil to make the noise stop.
“You wanna learn how to play?” he asked, motioning his eyes to a bass guitar leaning against his dresser.
“Fuck yeah!” I said.
“You wanna learn how to play?” he asked, motioning his eyes to a bass guitar leaning against his dresser.
“Fuck yeah!” I said.
©2006 Rockism 101. All Rights Reserved
It was cool to read this story. Now I know you a bit better. I love that.
ReplyDeleteThanks Essay Mama. :)
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