Between “I Can’t Explain” and Live At Leeds, I adored the Who as fervently as anyone’s ever adored any rock ’n’ roll act. It wasn’t only the way they sounded and moved I loved, but the amazing stuff they wore. Backstage at Winterland in San Francisco, I once had had a chance to pilfer the unguarded gold sequin jacket Pete Townshend wore over ruffly shirts through most of 1967. Half of me yearned to possess the jacket as implacably as the protagonists of The Robe, starring Victor Mature, yearned to possess that which Christ wore on the cross. On the other hand, the Who were my heroes, and it wasn’t in me to do anything that might cause them dismay, so I sighed a prodigious sigh, left his jacket where it was, and went back out front, where Keith Emerson of the Nice was jamming daggers between the keys of his organ. Much better, I thought, that he should jam them between the ribs of bass guitarist Lee Jackson. Anything to keep the boy from singing!

But I’m getting off the track. Little did I realize at the time that I may just as well have made off with The Jacket. Less than a year after I’d resisted the temptation to swipe it, Pete took the stage of Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium in jeans, an utterly ordinary blue T-shirt, and an unbecoming haircut. Roger Daltrey alone looked glamorous, and it seemed to me that it might be the beginning of the end of my adoration for the Who. (I was right.) Yet another year later, when I interviewed Pete for the first time—and the close, close personal friendship between us that thrives to this day was born—he explained that he’d left The Jacket in his closet in Soho just to confound fans who took for granted that he’d always wear something amazing. Which explanation didn’t satisfy me then and doesn’t satisfy me now.

I was reminded of all this on getting my first look at Bryan Adams’s ‘‘I Need Somebody video, in which Bry wears jeans and a white undershirt. And consequently looks really dreadful. Indeed, Bryan needs nothing more than his “I Need Somebody” video to join Billy Squier, Michael Stipe, Bruce Springsteen, all your Southern guitar armies, Mick Fleetwood, and Neil Young in The Rock Slobs Hall of Shame.

If you’ve been reading this column attentively—and this column has only attentive, devoted readers—you know that Eleganza doesn’t deny that deliberate slovenliness had a time (the era when it was unthinkable not to be polished to within an inch of one’s life—to have spitshined one’s shoes, for instance, to a gloss in which one could, if one had to, perform minor surgery) and a place (wherever people’s jaws would drop in shock at anything other than such polishedness). You know too that Eleganza enjoyed the Rolling Stones’ studied mismatchedness and the larger-than-life pimples on their album covers as much as the next fellow.

But that was a couple of decades ago. To come on a concert stage or videotape in a white undershirt in 1985 isn’t to fart in the face of rigid convention, but to fit into one of the most ignominious traditions of rock since-the-60s, that of slobbishness for its own sake.

There are those, I know, who’ll say, “But, John, to appear on stage in a white undershirt is to make A Statement, is, in fact, to say, ‘Hey, it’s my music that matters, man, not my fuckin’ clothes.’ To which I reply, “Hey, piffle. If one’s music is of so little interest that his or her looking like a million dollars during its performance overshadows it, then one ought not to be making it in the first place.”

A couple of interesting things have occurred to me recently. The first is that, in terms of dress, Prince isn’t the great original he’s so widely been mistaken for. That is, he isn’t the first of anything at all, but rather, the last of the New Romantics!

By the time you read this, rock ’n’ roll types will have been wearing shag haircuts for over 15 years—some of them, like the AOR-mongers and heavy metal nitwits this column’s forever vilifying, continuously. (As I’ve pointed out before, Quiet Riot’s Rudy Sarzo, for instance, doesn’t seem to have changed the length or placement of a single hair since the days when he used to try to spirit away members of this column’s last performing band.)

What this means is that, for the first time in rock history, one generation’s content—no, eager—to look almost exactly like the one immediately before it. In my day, one simply couldn’t have conceived of anything less hip than looking just like the big stars of a dozen years before. Of course, in my day, if a rock howler had written a song in which he warned the Soviet Union that it had better watch out for America’s superpatriotic new generation of rock ’n’ roll fans, he’d have been laughed off the face of the planet. Would that that unconscionable buffoon Sammy Hagar could be.

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This is what I and hundreds of thousands more like me tromped around the nation’s campuses dressed in a manner that farted in the face of collegiate tradition and chanting, “On strike! Shut it down!” for, so that the teens of the mid-’80s could be heavy into mindless jingoism?

You read it here first—patriotism sucks. It’s humanism that you want to get into. The real enemy isn’t the Soviet Union, but the sort of nationalistic thinking—or lack of it—that Hagar’s song “VOA” represents. Don’t believe me. Believe the eminent historian Arnold Toynbee.

Think of yourself not as an American (or, for that matter, as gay or straight, black or white, Gentile or Jew) but as a person, one who’s likely to have a great deal more in common with others his age in other countries than with the corrupt old assholes who boss his own. In this way, do what’s in your power to to make war slightly less likely. The Soviet Union’s megalomaniacal leaders are no bigger assholes than our own. The Soviet Union’s megalomaniacal leaders are no bigger assholes than Sammy Hagar.

Don’t register for the draft. Your parents have been paying taxes since well before your birth, as your grandparents did before theirs. You owe your country nothing. Indeed, the whole notion of “country" is a scam that corrupt old assholes use to get you to indulge their megalomania. If they want to fight, let them do so as in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Two Tribes” video—one on one, with avowed homosexuals singing on the sidelines. They’re way out of line telling you it’s your job. ff anything, it’s your job to resist their attempts to involve you, for by doing so you make the world a happier place, a less violent place.

Be all that you can be. Avoid the armed services like the plague. You’ll look less good in a uniform than Bryan Adams does in his fucking T-shirt.