Rock and Roll Requiem

The Times They Are a'Changing.  We have Rocked Around the Clock, my friends. Let's gather around and listen to that haunting tune by Neil Young, and hold our hats to our hearts as Rock and Roll climbs the Stairway to Heaven.

Hey Hey, My My
Rock 'n' Roll will never die.

Sure sure, you say. We've heard it all before. When the Sex Pistols came out and Rolling Stone magazine declared that "Rock is Sick."  Or when rock became of a parody of itself with the hair bands of the 80s. Or when the 60s rock star actually hit 60.

"I still look better than Keef."

But last year at this time, the Guardian reported that a measly three tracks of the top 100 songs in 2010 fell in the rock genre--and one of them was a thirty-year old Journey ballad called Don't Stop Believin'.  Doesn't look any better for this year.  I checked the Billboard Top 100 for 2011 and counted three rock acts again (and counting Avril Lavigne is a stretch).  So that's two years in a row where rock and roll accounts for a whopping three percent of the top 100 hits.

She's just run her course, from Elvis, to the greasers, to the British Invasion, to Psychedelic, to hard rock, to glam, to punk, to metal, to New Wave, to grunge, to indie.  Fifty years of guitars and sweat; sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. 

That's not to say it will die; that would be a bit melodramatic.  It will join the genres of ages past as part of the Museum of Music.  There's still great jazz bands around, long after the days of the hep cats and jive beats.  The blues, baroque, folk, bluegrass.  All still there.  But they no longer prevail, no longer capture the zeitgeist.

Lay the blame where you please. Simon Cowell and his schlock reality shows, greedy record companies and their accelerating revolving door of the Next Big Thing, technology replacing musicians the way machines replaced factory workers.  But like everything else, like us, Rock and Roll grows old; it withers under the weight of its years.  The way rock, with its electric amplifiers swept aside the clarinets and trombones, so the computers are sweeping aside the old tube amplifiers. 

"But these techno guys can't even play an instrument?"  No.  Neither could those early rockers.  How do you think those jazz guys felt--woodshedding for years to get their chops down--to see these pimply teenagers power-chording their way to riches.  Malcolm Young (rhythm guitar, AC/DC) has probably got a 50' yacht thanks to G, D and C chords.  (No offence, Malc--if I were in a band with Angus, I'd stick to chords too.)

It's passing is bittersweet. I'll rock to the end, with my friends, in garages, studios and questionable joints everywhere.  And I'll always love it, but I will not over-mourn its passing.  Rock and roll melded with other kinds of music and made beautiful babies.  A little bit of Alice Cooper in Lady Gaga. A little Black Sabbath in that trance beat. 

I'll miss the poetry.  I mean, I like the party music, the LMFAO and the Lady Gaga, but it lacks the poetry of John Lennon, Pink Floyd, Bon Scott.  The current crop of pop music lacks that honesty and self-reflection. But this too shall pass, as the pendulum swings.  Early rock-n-roll wasn't all that stellar in the lyric department, as I recall ("I found my thrills...", "She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah...")   And I'll miss rock-n-roll ugly.  It's all polish and pretty and perfume now.

Then (Shane McGowan, Motorhead)

Now (Adam Levine, Rihanna) 

On the other hand, I like the way that control has been wrested from the record companies.  Digital sharing of music has shaken up the system, decentralized control from the conglomerates and created an environment of chaos where, I think, creativity will thrive and new and unexpected things will arrive.

Sure the labels are predicting the end of music.  But music will always be there, and it will always be transcendent and divine.

Incidentally, right now I'm listening to Otep, Smash the Control Machine, and Five Finger Death Punch, Generation Dead, and Muse, Exogenesis.  All good, relatively new stuff, IMHO.

Anyway, you may not agree with me, but I'm right and you're wrong.  So there. 

So let's raise a toast, shall we?  A toast to St John of Liverpool, and Jim Morrison and Janis and Jimi and George and Kurt and Keith. To being 14, drunk and giddy, walking into your first arena rock concert.  To making out to Led Zeppelin III.  To pulling Wish You Were Here, brand-new, out of it's record sleeve, careful to handle it only by the edge.  To listening to Fool to Cry over and over again after your first heartbreak.  To the sweaty mosh pit at the Commodore when Pearl Jam played there before they made it.  To the soundtrack of my wild and beautiful youth.  You Rock, rock'n'roll.

How I Spent My Summer Vacation, 1989

Ain't got no picture postcards, ain't got no souvenirs,

My baby, she don't know me when I'm thinking 'bout those years.

-- Tragically Hip, New Orleans is Sinking

After second year chemical engineering at UBC, I couldn't find an industry-related job.  Times were tough for engineers in 1990; doubly tough when recent grads a little older than us were boasting of when companies used to vie for their affections with promises of new cars and ten thousand dollar signing bonuses.  Also, I was and continue to be absolutely abysmal in job interviews.  Seriously, it's like I'm hovering over top of myself, slapping my forehead and thinking "Did you really just say that, you moron?"

What's more I was not completely convinced I'd passed. In first semester I'd gotten 23% and 25% in my calculus courses, although it was aces all the way in Drinking 101. I'd completed the test for the esteemed 40-Beer patch in an astounding 6 hours and 23 minutes.   Joining a frat didn’t help academic matters any.  You needed a 55 average to stay in the game.

So, jobless, I headed back to Winnipeg, where I'd lived and bartended until the year before.  My buddy Jamie had a pad on Manitoba and Salter in the North End (or as the media refer to it, "Winnipeg's troubled North End").  Jamie was a big feller and he bounced at a couple of the more questionable joints in town.  The house where he lived was pretty much a tear-down and you never really knew all the faces who were crashing there.

It was 1989. Nirvana was trying to make it in the Seattle bar scene, and the internet was still just text-driven bulletin boards populated by nerds. The 90s were out there,  just waiting to happen.

I went down to the Unemployment Office and perused the little indexed cards looking for something I was remotely qualified to do.  There was nothing for engineering, but there was a job requiring a guitar player and another looking for a bartender.  Bingo!

My prospective employer, David M, ran a pawn shop on Main Street in Winnipeg, a street comprised primarily of lo-rent hotels, bars, pawn shops and discount stores.  Like any pawnshop, guitars are a good chunk of the business (what does this tell you about guitar players?), along with jewelry, small appliances and stereo equipment.  David needed someone to keep the axes tuned and demonstrate them to prospective buyers.  It was close to where I lived, and I could handle keeping a bunch of guitars tuned.  And the job interview was a lot less stressful than Proctor and Gamble's.  I took the job.

This ain't it, but it looked a lot like this.

David and Karen were your stereotypical old Jewish couple who would argue back and forth in Yiddish all day, regardless of who was in the store.  I liked them a lot.  And they liked me.  I was honest and showed up to work sober (if occasionally hung over).  The clientele was primarily natives, who, along with Eastern European immigrants, comprised the dominant ethnicity of the North End.

One time, some guy pulled up in a Caddy looking for a radio for his garage  "Just something cheap" he kept saying.  Whatever David put in front of him he'd balk at the price, and said if he wanted to pay that he'd go to "regular" store.  Well David didn’t like that and he took the radio and smashed it on the counter and said "There!  That's what I'd do rather than sell it to you.  Now get out of my store." 

Nights and weekends, I worked the Manor Hotel just down the street.  This may have the dubious distinction of being the biggest dive in the North End.  It was mostly haunted by old-man Ukrainians and Poles who lived upstairs drawing welfare.  The beer was literally so bad that I couldn't even give it away to my friends, who were not exactly folks with the most discriminating of tastes when it came to alcohol.  Not a word of a lie, I had to manually remove cockroach legs from the beer before serving sometimes.  I've no idea how they got into the beer lines.

Every morning at 11:00, four rubbies were lined up at the front door waiting for opening.  They'd file in to the same dark table at the back and order a glass of beer between them.  Their clothes were stuck to their bodies, they'd been wearing them so long, and their breath was the sickly-sweet of decay.  Every one would savour one "virgin" sip from the glass before pulling out the bottle of rubbing alcohol and topping 'er up.  When the liquid in the glass was clear--pure propyl alcohol--it was my cue to kick them out.  They'd spend the rest of the day under the railway bridge.

"Killer" had some kind of degenerative muscular or nerve condition.  He was a young fellow, a couple of years older than me, though shriveled and bent by his condition. He'd piss himself and not even know it, so he didn't always smell the best.  Plus he was a homeless alcoholic.  He'd come in a shoot pool a while when his check came in, and boast about how he could kick anyone's ass on the table.  Friendly guy.  I came out at closing time one time and he was lying the street.  I guess a bunch of thugs had come by and kicked the shit out of him and caved in his face pretty good.  I called the ambulance and saw him off, but never knew what became of him after that.  That's the North End for you right there, though.  I grew up there so I never realized at the time how crazy it was compared to just about anywhere else. 

My evenings were spent with drinking with various bouncers, bikers, gangsters and ne'er-do-wells.  There as Adolph--half German and half Apache. He didn't like to drink because it got in the way of his fighting.  And Steve was tougher than a sack full of frozen hammers, but had a heart of gold.  He got into the heroin though.  And my buddy Jamie was the biggest of them all, though that meant taking on all comers.  He even got a busted beer bottle in the throat that summer, but pulled out of it OK.  I have this surreal memory of us all doing acid one night and heading down to what passed for a carnival in the North End--a few rides and hucksters set up in the Loblaws parking lot--and then partying with the carnies until the wee hours.

It wasn't exactly a sustainable lifestyle, or even a safe one. I was 24 and the choice was stark:  was I going to be an engineer, or run with the bad boys? It all depended on that letter from UBC--pass or fail--and until I got it I lived in a mélange of two worlds and nothing seemed real. I think maybe that's why I went so crazy that summer, why I marched jaw-first into the harshest situations I could uncover--to make it real, to banish the fog of my future by experiencing the now in all its exquisite insanity. Maybe, here in Kabul, I'm still doing that.

I got the letter from UBC late in the summer and was incredibly relieved to find I'd managed to pull the rabbit out of the hat and manage a 57% average, and was soon cloistered once again in the hallowed halls of UBC.  I never went back to Winnipeg after that.  But images from that summer are still seared into my cortex 20-plus years later. 

From Disneyland to Kabul in One Week

Well a belated Happy New Year to you.  I'm currently sitting in a lounge in Dubai Airport enjoying what will probably be my last beer for a few months and preparing to fly out to Kabul at four in the morning.  It's eight at night now.  So there might actually be a couple more beers.  It's back to the war so that means back to the blog!

Dubai Airport.  Fannnnn-cy.

Meh.  It's a blend.

My R&R was awesome.  Alice, my six year old, wouldn't let go of me for days after I got back.  Oscar, 8, wanted to play soccer with me everyday.  Even Helen, my wife, was happy to see me.  We had a fantastic Christmas and New Years with friends and family.  The highlight of the trip (apart from seeing my family of course) was the trip to Disneyland in California, the Happiest Place on Earth. 

The weather was fantastic and we had five days of sun, swimming and exploring Disneyland and that other park right next door, the name of which currently eludes me.  When you walk into Disneyland the first the thing you hit is Main Street.  Not just any Main Street but the apotheosis of Main Street.  Main Street USA.  I suppose you could get all cynical and point out that Main Street is just a ruse for extracting money from tourists' pockets on the way to the rides, but I found it strangely moving after four months in Kabul.  City Hall, the movie theatre, the ice cream store, the parades, the olde-style trams and horse-drawn buggies, and a hundred-foot tall, gloriously decorated Christmas Tree and the Magic Castle in the distance. 

Main Street, USA, Disneyland

The kids were climbing over themselves getting autographs from all the Disney characters (especially Alice!), ogling the mouth-watering candy, and figuring out which direction to go exploring. 

Everyone is always smiling in Disneyland. The best thing is that, if a child starts crying for some reason, he is immediately cordoned off by a bevy of dapperly-dressed dandies in orange and white striped suits and hats who turn and face the crowd forming a human wall that we might not be subjected to the sight of human misery.  They slowly back up, and, if the child does not cease his wailing then the family are backed through a gate and pushed behind the grand façade amongst the empty palettes, garbage bins and forklifts and expunged from the Magic Kingdom.  Such is their dedication to a happy experience for all. 

Smile ... Or Else!

There's  a lot of wheelchairs at Disneyland.  I think you must get some kind of line bypass or something, because the place is crawling with folks pushing around wheelchairs occupied by people who were forever getting up out of the wheelchair.  There was also a lot of strollers (they have designated stroller parking at Disneyland) filled with kids who were, frankly, too big to be in a stroller.  The wheelchairs and strollers are excellent for navigating crowds.  Just point your wheeled device and push to clear the way in front of you.

Another cultural observation is that those Tap Out brand T-shirts they make only come in in three sizes:  XXL, XXXL and muu-muu. 

I was, of course, very interested in the engineering aspect.  Actually Walt Disney called his design team Imagineers, a moniker that might seem pretentious unless you take into account the grand scale of the place and exquisite attention to detail.  Even the garbage bins in the different parts of the park were designed to fit the theme (how can you tell I'm an environmental engineer).  They could have easily put in painted plastic fences around the rides, but opted instead for beautifully realized wrought iron creations.

We need a mountian for this ride?  No prob, we'll just build one.  Let's call it Bear Mountain.
Oh--and let's make it shaped like a giant bear.

And the animatronics!  Splash Mountain was my favourite.  I don't even know what Disney movie it's based on. Brer Rabbit?  It's probably an old movie that has some politically incorrect component to it so they don’t show it anymore, but the singing wolves and rabbits were really a wonder to behold.  The best part was that Helen always situated herself in the seat she thought would get the least wet and inevitably got more soaked than the rest of us. That was revenge for Helen making me go on the California Screamin' roller coaster.  That is some roller coaster.  And the Ferris wheel scared the crap out of me too.  Your car shifts suddenly as it moves around the track.

Scary Roller Coaster and Ferris Wheel.  Look closely and you can
see how the cars in the Ferris Wheel shift as they turn.

Oscar was oddly fascinated by the empty, little movie cinema on Main Street that showed the original Mickey Mouse movie, Steamboat Willie, from 1928 over and over again.  Every might, on the way home, the kids would stop and watch it and laugh all the way through.  Hats off to Walt Disney is all I can say.  As far as our family was concerned that place really is magic.

Where I'm headed, big booms in the sky at night mean somehting completely different. 

So now I'm on my third pint after saying good-bye to my family, flying to LA, a four-hour stop-over, a 17-hour flight to Dubai, an eight-hour stopover, and an upcoming flight to Kabul, arriving Monday morning.  When I walk out of Kabul Airport there will be machine guns trained on me and I'll know I'm back to the war.

That said, I've got friends there, and I'm looking forward to seeing them.  Back to Canada House BBQs, working out at the gym, reading and writing, and doing some important work.

It was hard leaving though.  Harder than the first time.  Helen and I try to gloss over the fact that I'm heading for a war zone, but the kids sense it.  They know.  They've got it tougher than me.  Helen has to manage the family by herself, and the kids have to make do without a father.

Well, now I'm on my fourth pint and getting all maudlin and having to rely on spellchecker more and more so I'll sign off here.  Talk to you soon.

Epilogue

Arrived safe and sound in Kabul as advertised.  I knew I as in Afghanistan, because we were stuck on the plane for the better part of an hour while they tried to find some steps so we could get off the plane.  Then the power went out in Customs...twice. A gorgeous sunset as we flew in.  The picture from the through the airplane window doesn't really do it justice.

Sunrise over Afghanistan

Mountains south of Kabul from the air.