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.
Hyden’s real subject is what classic rock has left behind in a world in which the heroes of old are either dead or no longer in the game, the album format doesn’t get the respect it once did, and stadium rock is rarely played in a stadium anymore. What have we rejected from the past? What have we preserved from it?
These questions can only be answered with competence by someone who loves those old bands AND who loves new music. These questions can only be answered by someone who’s so clear-eyed and dedicated to truth that in the same volume in which he gushes over Bruce Springsteen and Fleetwood Mac, he decides that the defining classic rock act is a group that he doesn’t even like. (Spoiler alert: It’s The Eagles.)
In his search, Hyden spends nineteen chapters inspecting dinosaur rock from every angle. He flips it over, slices it open, and bleeds it out. He embraces it and defaces it. His base is his own personal love for these bands, but he also understands that culture does not and cannot stand still for anyone. Not even Neil Young. Culture is always moving. It’s always slippery. Sometimes it goes to places that you couldn’t have predicted and that’s what’s interesting about it.
Topics in this book include drugs, “the road” and its toll (and the many songs about it), death, the decades-long history of people declaring that rock is dead, the deathless appeal of corny love ballads, what happens when rock standards and political campaigns mix, the long shadow of Aleister Crowley, how the creation of and the reception to Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile illustrates a sea change between eras, how some once-derided albums became celebrated later as audiences changed (Hyden’s chief example is McCartney II and I raise my glass to that), and the most spirited defense of Phish that I’ve ever read.
I have never heard Phish. I’ve long harbored a kneejerk reaction to Phish due to my prejudice toward anything that comes with the patchouli-scented whiff of the jam band. I have such little personal experience with this music though that I have no articulate reason for my feelings, so maybe I’m wrong. Passages such as this from Hyden definitely have me intrigued:
Phish interprets classic rock the way Zeppelin and the Stones interpreted the blues. The closer the Brits hewed to tradition, the phonier they sounded. The typical British blues musician was only going to sound gawky and prissy next to Muddy Waters. The only way out for British blues bands was to deconstruct, blow out, and aggressively exaggerate the blues to such a degree that it eventually became something else. This is what Phish does with classic rock… They turned their geekiness into a positive by acknowledging their distance from the classic-rock gods, reimagining rock history as a fun house for a special breed of rock nerd who is simultaneously reverent and irreverent toward the genre’s conventions.
Okay, sign me up. At least to give it a chance. (In Hyden’s story of discovering Phish, he relates the communication between him and the biggest Phish fan he knows, rock critic Rob Mitchum, who advises him to avoid the studio albums, none of which he considers to be good, and dive into the live recordings instead. This complicates things, but I kinda like that.)
If I end up liking Phish, that’ll be another thing that I owe to Hyden after the righteous high from a book that may as well have been written about me, so close are my experiences to his.
But, in the end, this book is not about me. It’s a legit study of a period in popular music history in which the once bigger-than-life rock gods are proving to be mortal after all and so might be their music in a world that’s moved past them.
Why is that interesting? Well, you’re not a real music fan if you’re not interested in history. When you’re interested in history, every band that you discover becomes fifteen bands that you discover as you trace their roots, influences, and off-shoots, and you love that.
Me, I’m all ears anytime someone talks about the crazy days of hippie FM radio from years before I was born and where the DJs would sometimes play full album sides and broadcast the heavy, progressive stuff that AM radio (the mainstream, once upon a time) wouldn’t touch. I also love stories of collectors of old blues and rockabilly records making discoveries by knocking on doors and being invited into the house of someone who knew Sonny Boy Williamson personally back in the day.
This is some real history shit and I don’t expect a youngster born in the streaming era to relate to it, but if they’re genuine music freaks I don’t know how it isn’t fascinating.