I’ve got a love-hate relationship with rock ‘n’ roll. I still find a primal pleasure in plugging in the electric guitar and finding a just-right distortion and a rocking rhythm. But increasingly, I wonder where it goes from there—playing out with rock ‘n’ roll often feels like mere imitation, like rehashing something that has gone before, and gone before many times. Playing in a rock band is getting more and more like being a historical re-enactor. And that can’t be a positive development, except to the eager suppliers of Spandex.
There’s still nothing finer than the Stratocaster-in-orbit ferocity of Jimi Hendrix. His explosive expansion of the guitar’s palette will likely never be equalled and his death is, to me, the most tragic premature loss in rock history, rivalled only by that of rockabilly prodigy Eddie Cochran.
On the other hand, there’s the slow decline of the genre since its headiest days, to the point that plugging in a guitar and cranking it to 11 is about as rebellious as opening a 401(k). The commercial radio waves offer little hope, just an endless succession of mediocre greenhorns armed with Mesa Boogies, sideways haircuts, overstuffed sonic space and a good public relations effort.
Whatever happened to “devil music”? Rolling Stone used to be ground zero for rockers, but over the last few months, the covers have sported old guys—Dylan, Springsteen, Sean Penn—absurdist stuff like Gossip Girls stars suggestively licking an ice cream cone (yes, singular). Kings of Leon, an actual young rock band, did make it to the cover in the same period, but it’s hard to escape the truth that rock has become just another genre, not the cultural force it once was. Rolling Stone‘s political coverage is far more interesting than its succession of sycophantic interviews with the old guard and vapid interviews with vapid newcomers. The magazine may well be on water skis approaching a shark.
Whether rock is dead is a question of little interest—rock will carry on (my wayward son) in some fashion, but whether its limited gene pool will provide the mutations necessary for something both new and interesting is another question entirely.
All this gear-cranking got underway thanks to the recent comings and goings of two musical acts, one of whom, Jake Shimabukuro, is reviewed in this week’s CD Shorts (p. 14). The other, Wolff, can be seen at Northampton’s Pearl Street May 26. Shimabukuro is in the habit of jamming with abandon on his ukulele. Wolff is a particularly odd case—Brian Wolff is a tubist who is trying to ignite a “tuba rock” movement.
At first glance, both of these acts seem like mere gimmicks. Rock ‘n’ roll is, first and foremost, the product of the electric guitar. And yeah, yeah, electronics have made incursions, but I don’t have to buy that as a good thing. Ukuleles are to guitar what the Suzuki Sidekick is to the Pontiac GTO. And the tuba? I don’t know—maybe an RV with one of those weird side awnings.
Yet in both cases, something unusual happens—the virtuosic Shimabukuro (who doesn’t necessarily dub himself a rocker, though some of his material argues for it) truly, undeniably rocks. Not only can he play the fool out of his oft-maligned instrument, he sometimes departs from prettier stuff to endow the thing with a tenor fury. It goes far beyond gimmick.
And Wolff must be heard to be believed. He is a tubist, but a tubist who sometimes manages to evoke Black Sabbath, or maybe Primus. He sings through his tuba; he hits it to produce rhythm, and, with the aid of pedals, he gets it to scream and growl with distortion. Once you get past the weirdness of it, you realize he’s really onto something. This is truly new ground, and truly rock.
It bears noting that in both cases there is probably a direct correlation between how much they are perceived to “rock” and how close they come to sounding like guitars. (And tuba can, it turns out, sound rather like a dinosaur rock six-string.) Not to evangelize overmuch, but if you’re looking for real innovation in your rock music instead of yet another conglomeration of pasty 19-year-olds with a high-powered producer and old ideas, maybe new instrumentation can tickle the synapses with grooves of an entirely new flavor. And if Brian Wolff visits the cover of Rolling Stone, there may be hope for the tired old rock world yet.