Rock 'n' Roll is Rock 'n' Roll

I was born in 1964, the year the Beatles came to America, and as they really were the most influential band going into the 1970s, in so many ways they shaped my life. I was a bit precocious as a kid and as a result, most of the friends that I hung out with after school were often four or five years older than me. Imagine, if you will, being 8-years-old in 1972 in northeastern Connecticut and having friends who were just becoming teenagers. What kind of music do you think I listened to?

I remember hanging out in Wayne Sperry’s basement. All the kids in the neighborhood did. While they smoked pot and made out with their girlfriends, I was allowed to stay there if I was quiet. As a result, I just sat there silently and listened intently to the music they blasted. At the time, I think, Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” and “Deep Purple’s “Machine Head” got a lot of spins.

One friend, named Joe, used to take me to his house and play me what he called “the real good stuff.” He turned me onto Dylan, Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, and the Beatles. I poured over the albums and memorized all the lyrics. By the time I was 10, my younger brother Kevin and I started collecting our own records.

Now, I don’t know why, but I have always gravitated towards the past. I think it is partly because I like to see where things come from, partly because I have certain since of gratitude, and partly because I always disdained the “unenlightened masses” swarming around the latest trends, even if it happened to be what I would later concede as good music. In short, I became a bit of a music snob, albeit, with pretty good taste.

Sure, I liked some of the newer groups that were hitting it big by the mid-1970s, like Boston and Queen, but if I had my way, I would have been much happier to turn the clock back to the 1960s.. By the time I was a teenager and my friends were listening to Blondie, Devo, and the Talking Heads, I was smoking reefer and listening to Steppenwolf, the Youngbloods and the Beatles’ “Revolver” over and over again.

Many of the popular artists of the late 1970s, who I love now, like Billy Joel, the Bee Gees, the Clash, the Ramones, or the Police, I resisted then. It wasn’t until I heard the song “Refugee” from Tom Petty’s “Damn the Torpedoes” album on a Saturday Night Live episode in 1979 that my attitude started to change.

When he hit the stage, I was startled. The energy was raw, rebellious, and electrifying. The hooks were magnetic and the lyrics were clever. And that voice- like a modern Dylan and Roger McGuinn, but with a fucking attitude. Not as angry as Elvis Costello per se, but a presence not to be denied. And not clueless and stupid like a Johnny Rotten or a Sid Vicious. “Who the hell is he?” I thought. Later, I heard the story of determination and defiance against the record industry behind “Damn the Torpedoes” and it dawned on me how Petty was carrying the torch of the truly thoughtful yet irreverent attitude of rock ‘n’ roll from his idols, like the Beatles, Dylan and the Byrds onto the next generation, while flipping the bird to the proverbial “man.”

It was Petty who opened up the floodgates of my mind for me and allowed me to accept new music as viable and not reject something simply because the crowd was into it. While that’s harder now, considering the sorry state of mainstream music, I have continued to keep an open mind because of Petty, who himself has continued to make great relevant music and sell out arenas and amphitheatres around the country as he pushes towards the age of 60.

That raw, defiant, and thoughtful music is what to me, rock ‘n’ roll is all about, no matter what era it is from. It is a music that honors the past and stays fresh and relevant into the future, whenever and wherever it is recorded. To me, that is the real spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, no matter what sub-genre you may want to classify it as. It is as Jerry Lee Lewis said in the film “History of Rock & Roll, as shown in class, “Rock ‘n’ roll is rock ‘n’ roll.” How could it be put any better?