INFINITY GUITARS

The poet laureate of Detroit, Michigan, Robert Seger, once proclaimed, “So you’re a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be/So you used to shake ’em down, but now you stop and think about your dignity.” Fifty years later, for those of us at CREEM, the first three of those accusations apply. If the reader feels as though the whole “dignity” thing should be a consideration, it’s worth noting that Seger was commenting on rockers (and rock ’n’ roll in general) looking a bit ragged around the eyes in 1976, when rock ’n’ roll was barely old enough to legally buy beer. Back then, the only time “classic” and “rock” were used in conjunction was when one of those mid’70s weirdos, some of whom were starting to get re-hipped to the joys of short songs and shorter hair, reaffirmed their commitment to rolling over 18th-century composers of classical music. Back in the 20th century, it would be another few years before “classic rock” entered the vernacular. Whether Bob Seger had any of that in mind when he wrote “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” is hard to say. The song was at an exact midpoint between Seger being the first person to apply basic arithmetic (“2 + 2 = ?”) to the Vietnam War and, with “Her Strut,” recording a very sexy song about Jane Fonda. So it’s not like the guy was unaware of the forces of history.

What were we talking about again? Oh right, “dignity.” A nice gig, if you can get it. But maybe not essential when considering rock ’n’ roll or, in the case of this issue, classic rock. The least forgetful of all the rocks. The rock whose adherence to memory is so elephantine that it never leaves the room. Classic rock, which was initially supposed to be a marketing term for radio stations that didn’t want to play disco, now encompasses nearly all the guitar rock made between 1962 and, roughly, now. On one level, this makes some sort of intuitive sense. We can’t be the first people to notice how much Kurt Cobain sounds like Bob Seger, how obvious it is that Linda Ronstadt would’ve taken Waxahatchee on tour in a heartbeat, or how spiritually compatible Creedence Clearwater and Sleater-Kinney are. At the very least we can all agree that the line between Led Zeppelin and Soundgarden is shorter than the short gray hairs we increasingly pull from our shower drain.

But, accepting that, at some point it’s got to stop, right? Is the future of rock ’n’ roll classification one where rock blocks of the Beatles are played right up against multiple Turnstile songs, with no context given except the fact that the songs occurred at some point in history, when someone, somewhere, was young? Who gets left out and why? Will the ladder eventually be pulled up on younger bands or, reasonably but equally bad, will there eventually be a cutoff point applied to the past, once the initial classic rock bands are old enough to be what the invention of the cotton press was to the Beatles? And, in that, will that make Five Finger Death Punch the new Beatles? If that happens, to paraphrase Axl Rose, “What’s so classic about rock anyway?”

In this issue we don’t so much try to solve the problem of classic rock, as is our wont, as revel in the contradictions. We have Byron Coley, a fella whose life mission has been to argue on behalf of hideous noise, making the argument that the very concept of classic rock is the purview of mammon, a cynical codifying enacted upon rock ’n’ roll by the usual coterie of moneymen. Just as passionately, we have Jerry A. Lang—who, in his role as the frontman for Poison Idea, has embodied the notion that hideous noise is just rock ’n’ roll, if you do it right—making the argument for classic rock being whatever he/we/you say it is. Are these two pieces in complete agreement with each other or totally irreconcilable? Yes and no, baby, yes and no. As our profile of Geese—an inarguably classic rock band (in the Jerry A. sense) that draws from the past six decades, whose members are young enough to have been potentially conceived at a Strokes show at a midsize venue—and their tour with Greta Van Fleet (the current standard-bearers of traditionalist classic rock, to the point of the band of 25to 28-year-olds treating Led Zeppelin in the same way that the Zep treated Skip Spence) illustrates, classic rock art and classic rock commerce can get along. You just need separate greenrooms.

In this spirit, we got Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore worrying every angle of nostalgia to its logical, contradictory conclusion, and just a few pages away we got Gene Simmons, in conversation with Maynard James Keenan, exuding a level of insouciance (regarding nostalgia, typical notions of public morality, etc.) that we can only aspire to. And, speaking of the Strokes, we got Julian Casablancas and we got Ice-T. If that seems incongruent, well, for your consideration:

“Cop killer
Cop killer
Cop killer
Cop killer
Cop killer, (what do you want to be when you grow up?)
Cop killer, (good choice)
Cop killer, I’m a muthafuckin’
Cop killer”

“She just can’t stop sayin’, ‘New York City cops
New York City cops
New York City cops
They ain’t too smart
New York City cops
New York City cops
New York City cops
They ain’t too smart’”

It’s basically an episode of Patty Duke.
The point is, and this is hardly a controversial stance, that the bigger the genre, the more malleable it is. And that’s how we like it. Not just because it’s true—genre boundaries are largely arbitrary and kind of dumb (if also fun to fight about)—but also because it’s in the confusion and contradiction that the thrill lies.

To those who weren’t there, it’s hard to explain just how much punks in the ’80s claimed to hate classic rock. Like, they hated Reagan and apartheid too, but, for a thing that wasn’t quite in the same magnitude of evil as those two, there sure were a lot of songs about murdering popular rock ’n’ roll bands of the previous decade. Of course, within 10 years, 80 percent of those same punks would be wearing their hair down to their flannels and playing in bands that, if the songs weren’t exclusively about being upset, sounded like either a slightly slower or a slightly faster Foghat. In a few years, just to gild the lily, those songs would themselves be played on the same stations that had soundtracked all those punks getting their asses kicked (by jocks who, un-averse to a bit of paradox themselves, were often real big Elton John fans) in the hallways of high schools across America. Maybe it’s the cycle of life and maybe it’s the famous Batman quote about punks living long enough to become classic rock. Or, if you play Jesus Lizard or Chat Pile back-to-back with Captain Beefheart or “Cheap Sunglasses” (or a particularly warped 45 of “Whole Lotta Love’”), the through-line is far brighter than any supposed dividing line.

Honestly, rather than reading this intro, you can just read the damn thing while listening to this year’s Redd Kross album. On that album, and in this issue, they make the case for classic rock being a living, kicking, potentially stultifying thing as well as we endeavor to. So we’ll let them have the next-to-last word in posing the classic rock question: “Will it end up in a bin/Accelerating world’s end/Or displayed in a glass case/My myth to embrace?” We don’t know the answer (or even need to). But we are here to wrestle with the myth, and here to do the math. 2 + 2 = ? indeed.