Editorial by Greg Shaw

Something about this magazine seems to make people want to express their innermost feelings about rock & roll and what it means in their lives. Nothing strange about it; is written by and for people who take the music seriously and relate to it on a deeper, more emotional level than, say, your average Kraftwerk fan. What's strange is that we seem to be a minority. If *** appears at times to be more concerned with events 10 years ago than with today, it's only because some of us remember a time when rock & roll mattered to everybody (or at least everybody we knew). The music elicited such a strong sense of involvement from its fans that it became an integral part of our existence, and the involvement was only intensified by the thriving pop culture that surrounded rock & roll in its better days. Small wonder that some of us have maintained that attitude and given our full support only to artists and trends capable of leading us back to that state of grace.

Anyway, our readers get pretty intense. They write us long unbelievably personal missives, and bare their souls as if finding a kindred spirit were some kind of minor miracle. And in a sense I suppose it is. Five years ago, the tone of our mail was often bitter or desperate; everyone wanted to relive the past, seeing no hope in the future. But lately, in the last year or so, all that has changed. Now the letter-writers are telling us excitedly about new groups, new records and new scenes — often in their own home towns. Defeat and apathy yielded to guarded skepticism and then gave way to unbridled enthusiasm. It's pretty clear to everyone now that the renaissance is at hand and we're all gonna have a lot of fun.

I've found it particularly gratifying to observe this process in some of my friends. For instance Gene Sculatti, whose guest editorial appears on the opposite page. Gene's one of my oldest friends; we started writing for a lot of the same magazines in 1966, and since then have had frequent long discussions about pop culture and rock history. If I was premature in predicting a pop revival back in 1972, Gene has only lately come to acknowledge it. Gene’s editorial makes a strong case for how much improvement there's been in the records of this last year or so. What Gene doesn't mention, and what I'd like to explore, is the state of pop culture, beyond what’s on record.

First, though, a slight digression. When I speak of Gene being among the last to recognize the fundamental change coming over rock, naturally I mean of us hard-core fans. What I'm wondering now is, what's the matter with everyone else? I can excuse the millions of kids still buying Deep Purple and Rick Wakeman; after all, they're at the mercy of whatever's pushed on them by record stores, radio stations and Rolling Stone. But what about these latter parties? Retail ignorance can be excused for obvious reasons, and the problems with radio are too deep-rooted to even begin investigating here. At the very least, though, one would expect the press, that elite corps of trained trend-spotters and the entrusted arbiters of our collective taste, to have a little more on the ball.

My contempt for most 'professional' rock writers is no secret. The majority of them are glorified male groupies, gossip queens and cocktail leeches, whose lack of writing ability is exceeded only by their lack of critical judgment. They churn out reams of rehashed bios and blind reportage of things seen and heard, without ever invoking the use of their brains. How they pass as 'critics' is beyond me. But let's overlook these people, because it isn't really their fault the record industry encourages this sort of parasitism.

We're still left with a good number of people whose intelligence and training makes them qualified, respected rock critics journalists, the ones you see most often in national publications. Of these, there are about a dozen who've -consistently shown any sensitivity to changing trends, who have embraced a large enough perspective to evaluate events in any sort of historical context. The others display a kind of persistent blindness that I fear will bring ridicule upon them when their time is over.

In the main, they suffer from the same malady they accuse us rock & roll addicts of: becoming habituated by their tastes, taken in by hype, and limited by their own nostalgia. The difference is, they don't see it in themselves. Of course we love hype; a really good, attention-grabbing, razzle-dazzle campaign is in the best tradition of rock & roll, and is no more to be feared than television (though it seems many of the same people who fear hype also live in morbid dread of TV). But those who claim abhorrence of hype fall victim to the more subtle hype of anti-hype, echoing "far out, man" to every low-key FM come-on. And as for nostalgia, I can't see how waiting for the next Dylan or Buffalo Springfield is any different from waiting for the next Beatles. Except that these people think of themselves as being hip. We think of them as being hippies.

To get more directly to the point. Most of these people have no business writing about rock & roll. Jon Landau said as much in his last Rolling Stone column. He pointed out that rock writers are hung up on words, place undue emphasis on lyrics, when they are after all only an incidental factor in the greatest rock & roll recordings. These college grad intellectuals would be better off reviewing films or books — as in fact most of them would prefer doing anyway. I can think of no better explanation for the fact that so many rock critics continue touting the same tired old artists that were big 6 years ago, and grovelling at the feet of any spinoff from the Woodstock Nation that happens to form a new group. All the forces of the music industry may be behind such artists, but the thrust of history has passed them by. They're yesterday's heroes. And anyone who can't distinguish yesterday from today from tomorrow should not be writing about teenage music.

Actually, this hasn't been that much of a digression. The rock press is a vital element in pop culture, and the fact that it's reflecting yesterday's culture is as good a starting place as any to launch our ruminations on this sticky subject. It isn't only what they write about — really, I see nothing wrong with their continued coverage of artists who are, after all, selling millions of records — but the style in which they write and the format in which they present their articles does have a bearing.

The point to be grasped here is that boring subject matter naturally tends to be presented in a boring format (Rolling Stone) just as psychedelic writing used to appear in rainbow-washed sheets of hand-drawn newsprint. On the other hand, if the subject is exciting, it should be displayed in an exciting fashion. 16 may be crude, but it gets the message across to its readers: there's a lot happening here. Hit Parader had the same cheesy layouts in the mid-60s, and yet it was the most relevant and intelligently-edited magazine of its kind.

There's great excitement in the new rock & roll —the teeming clubs of New York and Boston with their stark, staring, leather-clad groups —and who wouldn't rather see a few pages of Blondie clutching her thigh or Richard Hell biting his guitar than a 4-page color spread on Jethro Tull? Imagination, even amateurishness, is more effective in presenting this material than the staid magazine layouts commonly employed. That's why magazines like Back Door Man and New York Rocker have more to do with today's pop scene than anything else around.

Television has a bit of catching up to do, too. Midnight Special and Rock Concert are mired in a worn-out concept of presenting bands as if the viewer were at a mini-rock festival. The camera is here, the stage is there, the audience is over there, and it's all separate, all cleanly engineered and professionally filmed by the same union crews who do the Carol Burnett Show, so that any sense of involvement is negated. The viewer of Midnight Special is as detached as the reader of Rolling Stone', he's simply not part of any process of excitement that might otherwise be generated.

The exceptions come when a group makes their own film under controlled conditions. The few I've seen (I must confess rarely tuning in these days), notably the Bay City Rollers special —have often approached the excitation level of Shindig or even the TAMI Show. It's a lot easier to film rock & roll correctly than to re-educate studio engineers to record it properly. What's wrong is simply the concept of how the music is presented — they're still laboring under the delusion we want to sit in our homes pretending to be at the Fillmore, when we'd really rather be at CBGB. Still, it's improving. Some fine video-taped concerts have been shown on UHF in New York, capturing the scene in all its kinetic splendor. Now if only they'd show The Blank Generation on national TV.

Any discussion Of pop culture must come round eventually to fashion. It's all fashion, ultimately, but clothes are the most obvious and yet the most subtle indication of changing modes of thought. I have no intention of competing with "Eleganza", but in recent months my travels to France, England and various cities of the USA have revealed, even to these unobservant eyes, a startling influx of new trends among the most pop-conscious young people.

We're all aware of the death of hippie culture, even though the streets are still littered with its more stubborn trash. Long hair, beards, sloppy clothes, all that stuff is definitely out. So's glitter. So, in fact, is the fake Art Deco chic of Bryan Ferry and his ilk. Everyone now is conscious of their clothes, and dressing I think more neatly. But at the lunatic fringes of fashion, what do we find bu —nouveau Mod! Yes, guys in early '60s dark suits, white shirts, even the dreaded narrow black ties! A lot of the groups in New York and London appear on stage and on the street that way, with Beatles '65 haircuts. Girls are growing bangs, letting their Betty Boop bobs grow out to Sandie Shaw cuts, donning black knee-length boots, and yes you'll find the odd mini-skirt creeping in.

This isn't '60s revival, though. In the '60s we wore that stuff because we had little choice. Now, with every choice, it's done to achieve an effect, and the effect fits well with that of the music surrounding this scene, a music based just as casually on '60s Mod.

In England, incidentally, the papers are full of reports of a Mod revival, in fact there was a huge gathering of Mods held not long ago.

Rockers are back too, they held a demonstration recently, and at its extreme the British anti-hippie backlash has produced groups like the Sex Pistols whose growing legion of fans sport rudely butche-ed short hair, deliberately slashed and blood-stained working class clothes, and other things not so easily described.

Suits, ties, short hair, Mods & Rockers, and a general sense of alienation and protest — these are the real signs that something big is brewing. Far more indicative than the records. Every year has had its good records, and if we've got more this year than we've had since 1967, it means little in itself. But the existence of an audience looking for a style and a stance of its own is the most crucial thing we've been missing these many years, and now we see it forming.

It's no coincidence that the inspiration in fashion, like the inspiration in music, has come from the mid-’60s. That was the last great pop era, as no reader of BOMP needs to be told, and we must pick up from there in order to go forward. Only now it's not rock theory, not my opinion or Ken's or Alan Betrock's. These kids are doing it because it feels right, and historically, it is right.

Where it goes from here is anybody's guess. This whole scene may yet fizzle out before it can spread to the teenage masses. It's very disturbing to see how readily they all respond to the ersatz excitement of bands tike Aerosmith and Starz and, even though I like them. Kiss. The kids in England are equally conditioned to accept the phony. Watching Supersonic (a British TV rock show now being syndicated in the US) has been an education. Week after week acts like Gary Glitter, Alvin Stardust, David Essex, Mud, etc., etc. appear with the most artificial staging you could imagine, until they begin to seem interchangeable.

All I keep seeing is the manipulators —the managers, agents, publishers, etc. —perched somewhere in the rafters, pulling the strings.

Larry Parnes and Jack Good would be proud. In fact it's exactly like what was happening in 1962. What’s the difference between David Essex and Adam Faith? The Glitter Band and the Shadows? Alvin Stardust and Shane Fenton!

So much of what we accept as rock/rock culture is phony and dishonest. Is this the same music that was founded on defiance and rejection of hypocrisy? At one time we all knew what the enemy was, and that rock was youth's best weapon against it. So we grew out hair long like the groups, spent all our money on their records and concerts, and called ourselves hip, because we knew what was real and most people didn't. Now everyone has long hair, nothing is real, and the rock stars have so much money they identify more with Rockefeller than with the kids who gave them credence. Somewhere along the line, people stopped being concerned with what was real, and assumed they could just keep the long hair and still go on calling themselves hip. What a joke!

This pseudo-hip/hippie culture, if you can call it that (at one time it was; now it's nothing more than a set of hackneyed cliches) is the major impediment to the spread of a '70s pop culture. Like the 'critics' who are aesthetically stuck in the period of Crosby, Stills & Nash's first album, we're afflicted with FM djs who think it's hip to play Moody Blues and Ten Years After (I'm not making this up, I actually hear it, day after day, on both of LA's top FM stations). What makes them think it’s hip or happening in any sense? Well, gosh, weren't these groups at Woodstock? Didn't you see 'em in Rolling Stone? Didn't their former members unveil their new solo albums at Carnegie Hall? What else do you want?’

These people aren't aware of how foolish they are, because they're not aware of anything. Thankfully, the new generation is. There are enough people supporting the 'street band' scene, and in England the 'nouveau punk' scene, that these scenes will grow, and kids will have the choice between something real and the phony crap that's all around. It's hard for a mere teenager to reject a whole culture, especially one that calls itself 'hip', without an alternative. Now the alternative exists, and that simple fact is our best hope for the survival of rock & roll and the vital new pop culture that's waiting, just waiting for its chance to explode.

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