It Never Was the Way it Was: Mythology and Rock Music

Collect a bunch of myths together and you come up with a mythology. When this mythology is either embraced or rebelled against by artists with a shared vision, you get a shift in thought, practice, and added historical prescience to the mythology. When a mythology is used as marketing tool and all its symbols created in bulk and given a retail price 50 to 70 % above dealer cost... it is dead in the water.

I am re-reading Bob Dylan's book as well as Patty Smith's amazing "Just Kids" and cannot help but feel that I got shortchanged, having been born just a bit shy and off of the mark. But then again, that is what myths do, don't they?

In its basic form, the myth of rock and roll is no different than any myth of fame in the performing arts. I'm not sure how far back in time this reaches but I would assume if you could get a job painting portraits or making music for a king or someone else in power then it was better than working in the fields until you died like everyone else in your family did. If you were good enough and fate was kind, you could get the hell out of your lousy life of simply trying to live and not die of some sort of infection before antibiotics were invented.

The first tale of fortune that comes to mind is Giotto who was discovered by the painter Cimabue. The child Giotto was a shepherd and, according to the legend, drew such life like pictures of the sheep on rocks, that the passing artist discovered him and took him off to study with the masters of the time. Poof! One minute you are in the fields watching livestock and the next you are in the big city drawing for the rest of your life.

Actors have similar stories. One out of the thousands is Winona Ryder who was simply eating a bowl of gazpacho at a local place when a casting director saw her and scooped her up into the acting world. Poof! One minute you are eating cold soup, the next you are calling Ethan Hawk to bail you out of a shoplifting phase.... or something like that.

Since comedians are, most of the time, the best tellers of the truth, the rock and roll myth is best shown in "Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story". While the movie is a parody, somewhere along the line, everything in the damn film IS what we believe in as rock and roll.

So why do we need myths? BECAUSE THEY SELL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There is a general rule that is passed among those who work with creative types: the most talented people tend to be the nicest while the second tier will make your life hell. I think that most famous people who are talented ask themselves at one point, "Why the hell did I make it when (fill in name here) did not? And they are 100 times more talented than me!" To the truly gifted and hard working, this grows into a humility and gratitude, a grace blooms and a desire to just do better work, to be as good as those around them. To the UNTALENTED, that questioning is a cancer that eats away at them because they know they suck and have to do what they can to just stay where they are even though they cannot perform to the level they are expected. The wizard keeps pulling the curtain out of reach.

Failure is needed in this arena. I say this without any desire to have another human being suffer at the hands of idiots. But I mean that failure, which by definition requires attempting something, has a purpose. You learn to do what you do. The best of the best try to do better after each failure, the worst just blame everyone but themselves. Van Gogh never sold a work of art, though he would have given his other ear to do so. Still, with each painting he tried to be better and better at what he did. Every band, comedian, actor, and performer worth their salt goes through that phase of bad gigs. The Canadian comedy troup "The Kids in the Hall" played every week for a year at a place called The Rivoli, many times to three or so people. But they say that this was where they had a place to try and fail and hone their craft.

And that is the other inverted thorn of success. You awake one morning to being praised as a star for what you do but you did the same thing for years and nobody cared. You are the same person but the world shifted. That can lead to a serious mind screw that ends in either the seclusion of a recluse or an ego the size of Alaska.  If the world can shift so quickly in one way, what is the true reality of the situation? Am I the greatest artist in the world or someone who should still be selling jeans?

The myth of rock made many people for decades believe that if they just worked hard enough, they would be rock stars. Exchange the words "work" and "rock stars" to "love" and "loved back" and you have the paradigm of the Romance Industrial Complex. I believe this to be the the proof that the majority of Musicians are romantic idealists in one way or the other.

There has, however, in recent years, been a change in the myths of rock and roll, though the sum total may be the same if not greater. The rock and roll dream was this: a band is born, they rehearse and they are ignored in the beginning but then, locally, gain the attraction by the locals and then strangers. They are then noticed by some manager and/or some record company executive, rescued from the rest of the less talented struggling artists and taken into the guarded kingdom of the Music Business. From there they work hard and, after some failures and struggles, achieve the glory their talent so rightly deserves, making the lives of millions better by providing the soundtrack for their first crush, kiss, dance, etc. Their God given gift at last given its right place within the souls of the world and within the books of history.

As every episode of "Behind the Music" shows, the downfall is always awaiting the hero. But the machinations of the music business are a thousand times worse than what is shown. The "Behind the Music" tales always have something of a happy ending that perpetuate the myth. Why? THE PERSON WHO LOST EVERYTHING AND WHO WAS IN REHAB 10 TIMES IS ON YOUR TELEVISION AND YOU ARE WATCHING IT! They are still living the myth, but as the population of the religion age, the arc of the myths grow along with them. Instead of, "You can be a rock star," it now goes "You can be a rock star and screw up and lose everything and STILL be a rock star." Old age has made the rebel artists calmer and sober, more focused, have loving families, but, and this is a but BUT, they can still ROCK!

These days, the music industry cannot re-create the myths that were going strong up until, say, around 2000. Because of the digital age and their horrible mishandling of Napster's file sharing (see the book "Appetite for Self-Destruction" for the best detail of this), something new was needed to keep the religion going and before us it bloomed into a bouquet of mystical roses.

Since there is no money in signing an act to make money off of stealing their now non-existent record sales, the record companies created "360 Deals" where the record company gets a part of everything the artist does: sales, merch, licensing, live shows, you name it. If it makes money, they get a cut. So, while bands do exist and get signed, the idea of "making it" has shifted to youtube and all the singer shows on television. For the business it is  100% winning and for the artist it is a huge loss and a reverse of the trends that brought us great Music.

"The Voice," "American Idol," and all the other shows work off the same idea as reality television: get people who will work for nothing to do stuff while we make gobs of cash off of it. Television shows such as sitcoms and dramas cost money to make and hence the risk involved for the investment of the company. With the shows where the totally unknown singers go to reveal their hidden gifts to the world as well as the  people who let a camera crew follow them around to create a "reality" we can escape to, we are heading into dangerous territory with the value of what we call entertainment.

But, like the saying goes, the Truth rises. Shows like "The Wire" and "Breaking Bad" have redefined quality. However, the majority of quality shows are on cable or a service where you have to pay. But people ARE paying, so there is some hope.

Back in 1976, the BBC put on a series based on the Robert Graves novels, "I, Claudius" and "Claudius the god: and his wife Messalina". They were about the life of the Roman Emperor Claudius who was dismissed as an idiot due to birth defects but who came to be a very successful emperor after the assassination of his nephew Caligula. The series was an amazing work of art that still holds up to this day.

In the opening scenes of the amazing mini series, Aristarchus of Athens, after doing a performance for emperor Augustus, says to the servant who announces him,

"What a voice. Perhaps we should change places? Only the Romans can afford ushers with a voice like that. Did you have it trained?" 

The announcer, Thallus, states,"I was an actor, sir." 

Aristarchus: Oh, that explains it. Resting, are you? 

Thallus: No, Sir, I've given it up. Everyone's an actor in Rome, there just isn't enough work to go around. 

Aristarchus: And what there is goes to friends and relatives. It's the same everywhere. 

Thallus: The theater isn't what it was.

 Aristarchus: No, I'll tell you something else. It never was the way it was.

Yes, my friends, it never was the way it was.