Radiohead’s hotel room is too plain

Where have all the rock star antics gone? Why have the musical giants of our generation left us with nothing but music, no myths to build legends upon, no stories of excess or debauchery to discuss in record stores or concert parking lots? It’s quite boring really.

I grew up listening to The Who and at the same time being completely captured by stories of Keith Moon taking handfuls of animal tranquilizers, blowing-up hotel room toilets, driving cars into pools and tossing TVs out of windows. It was exciting. We could listen to the records and think about these larger-than-life legends, built on the myths and stories passed through word-of-mouth and rock magazines. It turned the passive activity of listening to music into a community experience.

People would spin their copies of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album backwards by hand, just because someone at a record store told them that it contained backward satanic messages.  The Beatles’ fans would share in their painstaking search for clues on album covers trying to figure out if Paul was dead or not.

I may sound like a jaded old man, but I just can’t imagine anyone looking through Arcade Fire memorabilia to find clues to whether or not a band member died.  I also can’t imagine anyone coming up to me and mentioning anything about Arcade Fire that didn’t directly relate to their music.

Even bigger bands, like Radiohead, don’t give us many stories to talk about.  Sure, Thom Yorke puts out a large amount of great music and does it in cool ways, but the Replacements made great records too and blessed us with stories of them playing sets of pop and country covers to annoy punk fans at CBGB’s.

The only contemporary figure who gives us something to talk about these days is Kanye West, and even he has calmed down lately. There was a time when I paid attention to the antics of Kanye with an anticipation for excitement that I’m sure Zeppelin fans had in the early ’70s, waiting to hear about what havoc Page and Plant had unleashed on their most recent jaunt across middle America. But Kanye has made a conscious decision to stop acting like a nut, depriving us of years of great stories.

Rock ‘n’ roll is supposed to be rooted in rebellion and myth.  The story of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the crossroads for the ability to play guitar is just as important to the foundation of the genre as the music he made. Kids used to start punk bands after reading articles in ’zines long before they heard the music. The stories and ideas were enough to inspire them to go out in the garage and make a racket. It was the mystique of Kiss that turned them into icons, not their songs.  Deep Purple and Black Sabbath were very similar bands, yet Black Sabbath are revered as legends because everyone knows a song and a story. Everyone knows “Smoke on the Water,” but few people know a good Deep Purple anecdote.

In a musical climate without great myths, how will we ever build legends?  Sure, Wilco puts out great records, but I can’t help but feel cheated that they give me nothing to talk about.  I want to hand my son a CD some day and have long-winded conversations about the bands on the CDs, but the way bands act these days, that will be a very short conversation.