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How Rock ‘n’ Roll Immortality Became a Lyrical Aspiration

Richard Kadzis

Commentary: We lost a lot of great talent this year.

Maybe it’s just me, but looking back over the course of 2016, it seems a higher-than-average number of rock ‘n’ roll stars left the planet.

Like Elvis or Buddy Holly, some of them will grow larger in death, which begs the question: Is rock ‘n’ roll dead, or just old?

That’s what a recent New York Times headline wondered.

CBS Sunday Morning contributor Bill Flanagan posed the question in a November 20 Times column, pointing out how innovation in rock music production, like jazz today, is a thing of the past.

As Flanagan noted: “A popular new rock band tended to sound a lot like beloved old rock bands, and the days when the Beatles moved in three years from the teen pop of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ to the experimentation of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ were gone.”

'Nobody loves me but my mother, and she may be jiving me too.' B.B. King... Late King of the Blues

Despite its evolution from the disruptive to the complacent, rock is not dead.

I prefer to remember this past year’s dead rockers for their timeless view of life as expressed through their lyrics.

So, let’s recount some of the great stars and attach a memorable lyric to each.

No doubt, among all of the departures, it was David Bowie’s death that hit the hardest. Baby Boomers were forced to “turn and face the strain” … Ch-ch-ch-changes that spelled out the boldface meaning of mortality for many of us.

Mortality hit Mott the Hoople drummer Dale Griffen straight in the eye.

It was Bowie who made Mott the quintessential new wave music model of the early 70’s, but we won’t soon forget that “six-string razor…my axe was cold” as death itself.

As Glenn Frey of the Eagles reminded us yet again, “They will never forget you ‘til somebody new comes along.”

Perhaps, after all, it was “a hookah-smoking caterpillar” who has given the call to the Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, who also sang about “this generation (with) no destination to hold.”

It turns out, that destination is rock music.

“Rock ‘n’ roll certainly is for old people now,” Flanagan also observed. “It’s for those young people who want it, too. Like any music that lasts, it’s for anyone who cares to listen.” I have a Gen X son and Millennial daughter who fit that profile.

Turning back to the great performers who passed away in 2016, Waylon Jennings, one of the Highwaymen, also left the building. His Stratocaster redefined the essence of Texas Country rock ‘n’ roll.

No, Waylon, I don’t think Hank did it this way.

Jennings joins Johnny Cash in Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven, leaving Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson holding down the fort at Luckenbach, Texas.

There are great quartets, and there are great trios.

One of them, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, among the hottest rock ‘n’ roll outfits of the crazy-creative early 1970’s, suffered two losses.

Goodbye to genius keyboard artist Keith Emerson, as well as the lead vocals of bassist Greg Lake, who gave us the modern holiday classic, Father Christmas.

“It’s all clear, you were meant to be here…from the beginning” as a truly seminal force in the Progressive Rock genre.

And then, “somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” upon hearing the news of George Martin’s death. Martin was the soundboard production guru who facilitated the Beatles’ evolution to loftier heights of creativity….or was that a revolution?

Leon Russell sadly went off searching for his Delta Lady.

Did I hear him “whisper sighs to satisfy your longing for the warm and tender shelter of (his) body?”

Then, Leonard Cohen, as great a poet as the Nobel Prize winning Bob Dylan, joined the Chorus of Afterlife, “like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a choir….”

“When they said repent, I wondered what they meant,” Cohen wrote about the future, which arrived 84 years into the Prince of Pathos’ career, much longer than most in the rock ‘n’ roll trade.

As Flanagan related in his Times column, “We have to face it, rock ‘n’ roll has grown old.”

Please, just don’t equate the music of dead legends like Jim Morrison, Janice Joplin, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain or other iconoclasts with our Baby Boom Generation geriatrics.

Oh, don’t forget, we need to mention Prince, right up there with Bowie in terms of bigger in death than life, as wrought by the Grim Reaper, who must be a rock fan…although I’m not in a hurry to find out.

Hey, another New Year’s Eve is just around the corner. I’m “gonna party like it’s 1999!”

Richard Kadzis is a resident of Las Cruces who, aside from his broadcast journalism career, works as a part-time DJ at KBUT-FM, community radio for the Gunnison Valley in Western Colorado.