Rock Hits the Hard Place

The thrill is gone—is it bad business or middle age?

Is there hope? This week, the J. Geils Band has settled itself onto the sunny, snowy peak of the Billboard chart. Score one for the good guys. J. Geils has managed to nudge off Foreigner, which on and off occupied the top slot for eleven weeks. Score eleven for the bad guys. And these days, in rock and in the record business, the bad guys are winning.

Big bucks, much media attention and even some good reviews go to a 598-page biography of Elvis Presley that is like a game of mumblety-peg played on a corpse. REO Speedwagon has moved more than 6 million copies of its latest record, thereby making Hi InFidelity the second largest selling album in the history of CBS Records. Rolling Stone, a magazine that was once the most prominent and articulate forum for rock culture, divests itself of much of its music coverage and aims for a more general readership. Record companies have cut back on corporate extravagances and are making a little money, mostly by kicking up prices. Punk is dead, New Wave is over, disco moved out when your older sister left home. The Clash can't swing a major hit single, so its albums don't get high on the charts; and does anyone know there's a great new record by a great new group called the Blasters? Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?

Wrote a song for ev 'ryone, Wrote a song for truth. Wrote a song for ev'ryone And I couldn 't even talk to you.

—John Fogerty

Those days are over: days when a rocker had a right to expect that the music he made—like Fogerty and his peerless band, Creedence Clearwater Revival—could reach a large as well as a knowing audience; when the radio played a dazzling diversity of music, not a range as thin as the air between two stations. For the first time, under the regency of radio programmers and the tyranny of marketing studies and demographics, rock 'n' roll has been successfully factionalized and fractionalized, smashed into a mass of splinters with few sharp edges. A song for everyone? If it has no specific gravity to unite factions of the audience, then it has a shot.

Rolling Stone's two-stepping toward general interest is a tacit editorial admission that rock music is no longer taken as the unifying force of a generation. The eager reception of Albert Goldman's lowlife Presley biography (150,000 sold) is an indication that there is an audience that wants, even needs, to have the rock spirit despoiled. That spirit can find nothing new to focus on, never mind to rally around. Social issues have always been slightly suspect in rock. But the upheavals of the 1960s, like Viet Nam and civil rights, redirected and rejustified rock by setting it within a more urgent social context: suddenly there were new subjects to explore, fresh issues for the music to explain, ideas that the rock culture itself could symbolize. That sense of unlimited possibility died in the next decade. "There was brilliant music made in the 1970s," as Critic Greil Marcus has said, "but because it had no way of linking up to grand mythic dimensions, it lacked the charge much inferior music had some years earlier."