Steven Hyden
Twilight of the Gods: A Journey to the End of Classic Rock
2018, Dey St.
In this addictively readable book, Steven Hyden opens with a story that most music nerds our age (Hyden, born in 1977, and me, born in 1976) know well.
It’s the story of having your head cracked open like an egg by classic rock radio back in the day. Where did I hear “Baba O’Riley” and “Stairway to Heaven” for the first time? I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I’m fine with giving the credit to KZPS, the classic rock station in Dallas when I was a teenager. My sources at Google tell me that it’s a country station now, but once upon a time it was the spot in my city for Jethro Tull and Lynyrd Skynyrd and Peter Frampton all splattered together on the same canvas each day. Everything that Hyden writes here about his hometown station WAPL applies to KZPS. He was in Wisconsin and I was in Texas, but we were both listening to same damn thing.
Hyden captures youthful discovery and how something as simple as a standard radio playlist of classic hits (that are new to a kid) can inspire lifelong curiosity. When music becomes more than mere audio wallpaper for you and becomes a place to go, a location as real to you as anything on a map, you eventually get interested in other places to go. When you like Pink Floyd’s radio standards, you might graduate to their albums. From there, the real freaks will dig into Floyd’s roots and contemporaries and maybe even explore later bands who picked up the baton. This can get messy, but when you’re a music nerd, you enjoy that.
Still, this book’s meat is its examination of the present day. When Hyden expends several pages on appreciation for the likes of Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath (and a lot more), his impressions simultaneously reflect the young man’s awe and the seasoned culture critic’s head for analysis. When he writes about the past, the present always burns at the edges.
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