There was a time when rock and roll was dangerous. I don’t mean dangerous in the manufactured sense, where a performer arrives at an awards ceremony wearing something designed to offend the people least likely to be offended. That is not rebellion. It is marketing.

I mean dangerous because nobody quite knew what was going to happen next.

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I had the good fortune, or perhaps the poor judgment of a teenager, to be on the rock-and-roll fast track in Los Angeles in the 1960s. I sang and played bass in garage bands, and then, almost before I quite understood how it happened, I was playing in a band managed by the well-known DJ Casey Kasem. In just a few weeks’ time, I went from the garage on 93rd Place to a recording studio and a movie set in Hollywood.  That is how fluid things were in those years.

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The movie still above tells the story. I’m at the far left, bass in hand, looking as though the future had already plugged in and turned up the volume. For a teenager in Southern California, there were few better places from which to watch the cultural earthquake arrive. And it really was an earthquake. You could hear it before anyone had named it.

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A new band with fresh guitar riffs and bass lines came through the radio every day. A Beatles song would hit the airwaves on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, half of Los Angeles was trying to figure out the chord changes. Then Brian Wilson would disappear into a studio and make everyone start over.

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The remarkable thing was not merely that the music was good. It was that it was new.

That is an important distinction, and one increasingly difficult to make.

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Rock has not exactly died. After all, dead things stop moving. Rock continues to tour, sell T-shirts, fill casinos, appear in television commercials, and emerge every few years for another farewell tour, whose chief accomplishment is to demonstrate the elasticity of the word “farewell.”

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But as a creative cultural force, rock seems to have entered that peculiar stage of existence in which the museum gift shop is busier than the museum.

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There is brutal evidence for this. Some of the most accomplished rock music today is performed by tribute bands.

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A baby boomer once left a Beatles tribute-band concert genuinely disappointed. The Paul McCartney impersonator, who played the famous Höfner violin bass, was right-handed. McCartney, of course, is not. “It ruined the vibe,” he said. There, in miniature, is rock and roll’s predicament in its old age: we no longer merely want the music played well. We want the past reproduced with archaeological accuracy. The Beatle bass has to lean the right way.

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Some of these tribute bands are astonishingly good. I have heard tribute musicians reproduce the old songs with a technical precision that the original bands rarely achieved live. The harmonies are spot-on. The guitar tone is spot-on. The drummer knows exactly where each fill belongs. Even the mistakes have been carefully replicated.

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It is magnificent. And faintly depressing. Rock and roll has become classical music with amplifiers.

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We now have a canon. There are sacred texts and the correct period instruments. There are authorized and heretical interpretations. There are pilgrims who will happily debate whether the 1972 live version was superior to the studio recording. Young guitarists study Jimmy Page with much the same intensity as conservatory students once studied Paganini.

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Nothing is wrong with any of this in my book. The best of the music deserves to survive. But preservation and creation are not the same thing.

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When I was young, nobody was trying to preserve rock and roll. We were trying to make it.

The instruments were not relics. No one spoke solemnly about the “legacy” of a twenty-year-old guitarist. We were all much too busy wondering whether the Silvertone amplifier would survive the gig or whether we had forgotten to bring an extra set of guitar strings.

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What happened?

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Part of the answer is simply time. Every rebellion eventually gets a commemorative plaque. The shocking becomes familiar. What frightened parents in 1965 is now piped through the speakers on the cruise ship, where those same parents are ordering another piña colada and remarking, with some satisfaction, that their generation changed the world. The adolescent soundtrack is everywhere.

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But one cannot storm the establishment after becoming the entertainment at Apple’s latest corporate soirée.

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The old rock bands were certainly commercial. Anyone who imagines otherwise mistakes nostalgia for history. We wanted records to sell. Promoters wanted tickets to sell. Record companies wanted hits. Money was everywhere.

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But something else was unfolding alongside the commerce: young musicians were stumbling into sounds that nobody quite knew what to do with. The musical accidents mattered. So did the limitations.

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Four teenagers in a garage with cheap guitars, drums, and microphones had to invent their way out of problems. Their imperfections became part of the sound.

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And so I find myself doing something my seventeen-year-old self would have considered evidence of senility: listening to musicians pretending to be the ones I once went to hear when nobody knew they mattered. And enjoying it enormously.

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Perhaps that is not hypocrisy. Perhaps it is gratitude. When a good tribute band launches into the opening bars of a song you first heard on a transistor radio, something remarkable happens. For a few minutes, the music escapes the mausoleum.

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And there it is again. Not merely the song, but the astonishing sense that once accompanied it: that something was happening, that the world had tilted ever so slightly, and that tomorrow’s music had somehow arrived before its time.

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The tribute musicians cannot reproduce that, of course. No one can. They can reproduce every note except the most important one: the surprise.

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And here, the joke turns on us. We spend a remarkable share of our lives trying to resurrect what has died, recapture the first thrill, replay the perfect summer, and buy back our youth, one concert ticket at a time. We demand an encore from time itself and are offended when time refuses.

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Time is merciless on this point: you cannot make the old new again.

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But the Gospel never asks you to.

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God does not hand you the past and command you to keep it alive. He raises the dead. The truly new thing comes from outside you as a gift, before you have managed to get nostalgia quite right. Christ does not say, “Try to feel young again.” He says, “Behold, I make all things new.”

So let us give rock and roll its requiem, but not yet its burial.

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Re-string the 1962 Stratocaster and turn up the Fender amp. Give the drummer four clicks, then listen to the tribute band play the old song once more.

 

They may be impersonating the dead, but for three minutes and forty-two seconds, the dead can still make one hell of a noise.