Where have all the rockers gone?

Wednesday, April 7
By Steve Janoski

Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bruce Springsteen, Metallica, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, the Doors, Motley Crue, Buckcherry.

They didn’t begin modern rock n’ roll, but they’ve kept it going through its toddler years of the 1960s and have kept it rolling since, bringing this hard, swaggering style of music to the masses by playing show after show for year after year, paying their dues and rising to fame.

And that’s the one thing that they, along with most other rock bands that have “made it,” share: they all started somewhere.

It was in some guitarist’s parents’ basement in Los Angeles or Freehold or Jacksonville that they got together.

They progressed, as we’ve seen so many times in “Behind the Music” fashion. They played in smoke-choked, dimly-lit bars, sold their brand to swaying, drunken crowds who, at least at first, didn’t care that they were there.

They lived in roach-filled apartments, drove for miles to play gigs, and kept on playing until they got so damned tight that you knew they were in it for the long haul, live or die. And eventually, they got “noticed.”

At least, this was the formula back then. Now? I’m not so sure.

In my carousing across New Jersey’s nightlife, I’ve come to believe that there just isn’t anybody playing their own guitar-driven, gut-busting, fight-starting rock n’ roll anymore. It’s become a “scene” of lowly cover band after lowly cover band, playing the same Rolling Stones and Billy Idol cover songs before their huge finale of “Sweet Home Alabama” rolls out.

C’mon. Really?

I’m not sure why this has all gone down the way it has. There are less venues to play than there used to be, but that’s not a reason that long-haired 17-year-olds should lay down their guitars, take their torn Maiden t-shirts off, and start going to school.

There are definitely enough places for these cover bands to play — they seem to find where I’m at every Friday night, so I don’t know why it couldn’t be an original band instead, or even a band that plays original songs at least half of the time.

I’ve never been in a band myself, but I’d imagine that there’s a kind of special feeling that happens when four or five guys get together and create a new song that they play for the first time and say to themselves, “Damn…that was good.”

It’s probably a way better feeling when they play that song out in public the first few times, and get a reception from the crowd that shakes the rafters and knocks beers off the table — I suspect that’s why musicians get into the whole thing in the first place.

There’s a clip on YouTube that I found recently of AC/DC performing their song “Whole Lotta’ Rosie” live in 1978 at what looks to be a small club in England.

The people are packed tightly together like toothbrush bristles, while onstage a shirtless, tattooed Bon Scott howls on the microphone while Angus Young races around headbanging and kicking and tearing through solo after solo, captivating his rollicking audience of reckless youths and the thing is just the embodiment of wild energy and passion, of fire!

Somewhere, sometime, that band played to an empty bar when they began; maybe they thought about just playing covers on the weekends when someone told them that they weren’t any good.

But they forged ahead… and look where it got them.

I hope the kids today are doing the same, because without them, rock n’ roll will soon die off, and the only things playing at bars will be the same half-hearted Skynyrd covers or the whiny songs from the bartender’s iPod.

Until then, though, I keep hoping that every bar I walk into, the next Bon Scott is nervously getting ready to walk onstage for the first time, tapping his fingers and shaking his leg, waiting to hear what the crowd will say about his band’s set.

To those about to rock: we’re all waiting for you.