My rock 'n' roll rant

Musing on the current crop of rock musicians and the 'sad state' of the rock world.

"The rock world is in a sad state if Bob Dylan's "Modern Times" was the # 1 album," responded "Don" to my last blog post. "This was definitely Dylan's best album in many years but nowhere in the ball park of his 60's and early 70's albums."

I started to write a pithy response in agreement with Don's comment. It blossomed into a full-scale rant. Wait until your boss takes a long lunch break or you're at home with a glass of wine in hand and then see if you agree with my theory.

Lack of virtuoso and roots music knowledge. That's why the rock world is is in a sad state. Kids learn three chords on the expensive guitar mom bought 'em and start a band called something like School Cafeteria Survivors (SCS).

SCS gets all their friends from their giant high school on their MySpace page. They wear tight jeans and eye-liner. They promise promoters they will bring their 200 hundred friends to a show and land local gigs.

Then they get invited to play Warped Tour. Next, they get signed by a major label. The kids are taken into a recording studio where machines make sure the singer is on key and multi-track layering obscures the guitarist's lack of chops.  A session drummer is used but the fact is never made public.

Magazines like Rolling Stone get millions of advertising dollars from the music industry so even the weakest studio efforts usually walk away with a minimum 2 1/2 star, more likely, 3 star review.

No one ever tells these teenagers in SCS to go back to their room and practice, practice, practice before taking the stage. Their teenage friends with their tin ears don't realize how cruddy it all sounds. They just want a chorus about not fitting in at school to sing along with while surrounded by 200 or 2,000 other misunderstood souls who all happen to dress exactly the same.

Guitar great Johnny Winter told me he practiced 5 or 6 hours a day. The rest of the time he spent listening to old blues record so he could steal/learn their licks. Kids are lazy today and justify their lack of chops by pointing to punk rock losers like Sid Vicious.

Derek Trucks, Robert Randolph, Dan Aeurbach (The Black Keys), Jack White, John Mayer (he's a mean blues/rock guitarists when he so chooses) are the only guitarists I can think of (I'm sure a few young greats slipped my mind) who are under 30 and can really bring it. Oh yeah, and my man Damon Fowler (pictured), who lives in Brandon. Check him out at www.damonfowler.com.   

We also have an overwhelming shortage of awesome vocalists, ones that can bring raw power  and real emotion like Robert Plant, Rod Stewart, Gregg Allman or Bob Seger did in their prime. Why? Kids don't put in the hours to learn how to sing. Allman likes to talk about spending many, many nights in Daytona blues bars learning from men much older than him before he perfected the rasp that makes "Melissa" and other Brothers classics so beautiful.

Great rock music is steeped in the blues and the rock 'n' roll invented by Chuck Berry. The linchpin of every great rock band is the pairing of an amazing guitarist and an equally enchanting vocalist, or a combination of both (think Jack White).

First-rate songwriting, which also only comes with countless hours of practice is the other key ingredient. Jimi Hendrix is Jimi Hendrix because of his mind-blowing guitar chops. But he is also Jimi Hendrix because he could pen and croon a top shelf ballad like "The Wind Cries Mary."

Do the kids writing woe-is-me junk today even know who T.S. Eliot is? I recall reading that Hendrix got into Eliot while backing Little Richard.  Or maybe it was Dylan that Hendrix got into while touring with Richard and that led him to Eliot. You get the point.

Bands like Pearl Jam and The White Stripes appeal to rock fans young and old because they have the key ingredients to greatness. The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and the other giants of the 1960s and 1970s continue to outstrip the majority of today's bands because most teens and twentysomethings are merely trying to live up to the standard set by 1990s-era Green Day records or even worse, blink-182.

The so-called alternative rock of today is fun but rarely sticks to the bones like the classic rock created in the 1960s and '70s. That music was made by men and women with bona-fide chops who gobbled up every old record they could get their hands on before creating music of their own. But who wants to devour ancient roots music and spend hours practicing when you can blast bad guys or steal cars on PlayStation?