https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95dtu6-zqUA

Way down inside … sometimes our thoughts come from there.  I feel like I’ve been asleep for about two weeks and just woke up.  Where was I?  Oh yes, before I posted the David Lee Roth news, and before my heater broke last Sunday, keeping me under my house instead of sitting here for all of last Sunday, I was contemplating … what should I call this subject I’ve been on … oh I know, “things music”.  But it turns out, my sleep was good.  Sometimes it’s better to go to sleep, sometimes that lets us get way down inside.  And yes, finishing that lyric, I need love.  We all do.  So following up on my last train of thought, the one where I decided the music that we denote as good is music that hits our emotions (all of them mind you), I wonder.  I wonder why some of it works sometimes, but not other times.  What makes us love it, what makes us need to love it, at that exact moment we do?  What makes us look at someone else as a star when we do?  The last interviews I was exposed to before I went to sleep (so to speak) were of Alice Cooper and David Lee Roth, and both of them said rock stars need, or today’s rock stars lack, some special attitude.  But I don’t think that’s it.  Mind you, I am reluctant to say those men are wrong, I mean who am I?  But there is something more… something that even they don’t see.  So what is it?

I’ve been around for a long, long time… okay not that long, but long enough to see many changes, long enough to have felt the ones I didn’t see.  I’ve seen bands be born, I’ve lived to see bands become legends.  I’ve fallen in love, out of love, and everything in between with the music that was the soundtrack to those times.  But really, there is something about the times in which the music is made that stays with us, something that weaves between our concept of love, our concept of music, and that time, something that perhaps even forms that time.  I remember history class.  When the topics in that class got to the time frames of the stories I had heard, meaning heard from my parents and grandparents, the “history” started to resonate with me.  When they got to the events of the 1960s, I had my own memories of those events, and from those memories, definitive feelings.  Whenever I see a photo or a video of Apollo 11, of the Saturn V rocket, those images stand for the memory of an entire time.  That’s not history; that’s personal.  The same can be said for music.  Sometimes I hear a song and I can literally see my surroundings of that time, my friends of that time, feel the feelings I felt at that time.  And those times… change, constantly.  Or do they?

Time waits for no one; we are taught to believe it moves on, ever-forward, ever-changing.  Bills come; bills go.  We make friends; we lose friends.  We have deadlines, measurements in our life, dates, even birthdays, that come, then go.  The very moment you are in right now … will go.  Those things change because of time.  Time pushes one thing away, then brings another near.  I said in my last piece on this subject that avocado green carpeting made way for granite countertops; shoulder pads made way for plaid flannel shirts, which made way for skinny jeans.  Yet it’s more: it’s the feelings we have as a collective, perhaps even feelings we are fed by what is released by the entertainment machine, that dictates what becomes popular.  Those are the nuances of style and taste that affect music.  In a way, perhaps even wealth affects music.  I want certain music for certain times.  If I’m making money and things are rolling along all happy-like, I am more likely to want happy music; if times are hard, not so much.  And somehow, the styles and tastes in music seem to reflect all of those cultural things — our house décor, our clothes, our hairstyles.  Music forms culture.  Music defines culture.  Culture forms music.  Culture defines music.  They are inextricably linked.  Music is taste, the taste of the times.

During what I referred to earlier as my sleep of the past two weeks, while running through the few TV channels that I have, I happened upon a documentary about the Rolling Stones called Charlie Is My Darling, a film released in 2012, but compiled from footage from a two-day trip the band took to Ireland in 1965.  It shows rather modest beginnings, the Stones riding on trains and a plane publicly next to other passengers, Mick and Keith writing songs together in a hotel room, Mick posing with people who were just “there”, playing to a theater-sized venues.  It features Satisfaction performed in such a raw state that it made me really listen to the song like I’ve never heard it before.  There is footage of an audience losing control so completely that the concert had to be stopped 25 minutes in.  The story around that footage featured an interview of a girl waiting to get in.  She answered the question why do you like the band, in that same manner that anyone has when they can’t answer why they love a human lover.  She answered, “I just like them, I don’t know why, I just do”.  Mick Jagger agreed; he said there was a sexual connection between the audience and the band.  Personally, I believe this thing that fosters changes in music is that — people feeling a feeling so strong, so much like love that they are compelled to follow the music; that’s the emotion I spoke of in the last piece.  Those fans loved this music so much you can see frenzy in their faces, so much frenzy that they couldn’t stop from trying to touch the band from the spaces they were on the floor of that theater, resulting in that chaotic riot that stopped the band’s performance.

As for time, the Stones were products of their time, inextricably formed by and alternatively creating the culture by the wants and needs of their audience, by the tastes of the times.  Mick explained that point too, saying the kids, especially those in America, wanted a different moral lifestyle then their parents; they were anti-war, more sexual.  So those times… made the Stones.  Those times made the other bands of that era, the other artists of that era.  And as much as the music was driven by these tastes in the audience, so were the tastes of everything else.  I was taken by the clothes, by the décor in the hotel room.  As for the clothes, the band dressed; they had on jackets and slacks, nice shoes — an ensemble.  The audience matched.  The girls had hairstyles with bangs and wore skirts and cute little-girl shoes.  “Long” hair for the boys was nothing more than a shag-cut.  And as for the décor, the hotel room had wallpaper with very large graphic flowers.  If I gave it a color (the footage was black and white), I’m certain it was dark with light flowers, perhaps navy blue with yellow and white flowers.  And I’m certain too, from my memories of living for a long, long time, those changes in taste, in outwardly visual things as well as cultural desires, correspond with each subsequent change in music.

In the 1970s, we started to decorate our houses with beautiful hues of orange and avocado green and harvest gold.  We had shag carpet and dark paneling.  And by the mid ‘70s, there was no war.  People’s “anti” status faded, and people started to go out.  Van Halen was formed out of that era.  The 30-year-old-plus photographs of Van Halen show these styles in the backgrounds; it looks like my parents’ house in that time-period.  But there was so much to culture then.  There wasn’t one unifying theme, like being anti-war, free-love.  There were many varied styles.  So we had varied music, rock started to sound different across the board.  In the 80s, we redecorated, again.  We took out that now-hideous avocado green carpet, replacing it with beige carpet, then grey carpet, then back to beige carpet only now it was that Berber industrial look, to hardwood, to tile, back to hardwood.  Those varied tastes resulted in even more varied music.  The Eddie Van Halen sound spawned bands that wanted to be Van Halen, admittedly or not, some good, some not.  We got punk, 80s new wave, dance music, many different types of music, all created from the different styles and tastes of that time.  And our fickle tastes made our music even more fickle.  Enter the 90’s.  Young people, they called them Generation X, replaced rock with grunge.  Why? Because they thought they were sad, thought they were angry, thought they couldn’t get jobs, they thought the music that came before was not deep.  But they got jobs; then Generation X put up their flannel and decorated their houses with hardwood and granite countertops.  Yet never doubt, they consider their rock music, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, as great, great because it defined that time of their youth, the time when they changed music.

But I blame grunge.  As rock music built on the tastes that came before, it seemed to narrow, and it narrowed so much with grunge that it, rock in general, was no longer on the pop charts.  I remember that happening, that stratification.  I remember thinking it was only temporary.  Mick Jagger seemed to think the opposite in that documentary: he didn’t know if it would last, if rock music would last.  I suppose because I’m younger, because it was so strong by the time I really started to love music, I thought the reverse, that rock music would always last, that it would always be relevant.  It wasn’t though.  It stratified.  The new music became alternative.  Anything that came before grunge became classic.  And other music flourished, pop music, hip hop music, music that satisfied the fickleness of the tastes, the impulses of the people to be satisfied with that feeling, that thought, that sound, for that moment, as their tastes changed at an ever-increasing speed.  There was stratification in the tastes of boys versus girls too.  The Rolling Stones documentary shows in the audiences as many girls as boys.  But as rock became older, some 80’s bands aside, the music became stronger, and a lot of the bands lost the girls.  I think there is something to that, something to allowing rock to become so male that the girls gravitated to pop music, little by little, separating the genders by taste.  I don’t know how that happened, I don’t know where to point, except I know it leaves out entire spectrums of emotions when both genders don’t identify with the music.

So with stratified tastes, that leaves many fans of bands like the Rolling Stones, like Van Halen that started its own revolution after (each with emotion and each with balanced appeal), wondering … where is the good music?  Now mind you, I’m a girl, so I do listen to pop music, and I dallied in alternative rock too, but I speak for the boys I’ve come to know here, and I’m tempted to say …  it has gone with the avocado green carpet.  But I’m not a pessimist and I don’t believe that it’s all behind us.  And I see something of the old tastes in the new; perhaps they’ve never gone.  What do I mean?

Last week, I happened upon a store selling mid-century furniture – the same furniture that I saw in that Rolling Stones documentary.  The young salesperson was going on and on about how great the pieces were, how they were really lucky to get this sofa and these tables from some house in Beverly Hills, how it is a bargain at $4,000 for the sofa.  I thought how much of this décor still exists in the houses I grew up in, how the sofa in my mother’s living room I crashed on when I finished driving across the country the second to last time would make this woman salivate, it’s so 1950s.  I told her my own furniture is from the 1920s; I said nobody is selling that anymore.  She said, “they will, everything comes back”.  That phrase stayed with me as she escorted me to a display room featuring 50s and 60s (and some 70s) furniture, expertly displayed against a red wall with concrete floors – the same concrete floors that are all the rage now in these places, and all I could think of was where’s that flower wallpaper from the hotel room in the Rolling Stones documentary?  They needed that flower wallpaper!  So there is something going on.  There are bands that are leaving the grunge sound behind, adopting sounds from the 60s-80s.  There is a gigantic poster for the new album by the rock band Avenged Sevenfold on the Warner Brothers building on the 134 freeway.  I’ve passed that building at least once a week for 12 years, and I don’t recall any rock act ever being on it; rock, not pop, on the side of the freeway, not in 12 years.  I saw at least three small billboards for the rock band Arctic Monkey’s new album.  Again, rock, not pop.  I’ve even heard songs that played first on the rock charts hitting pop stations; thinking of an Avicii song (he’s a dj, but the song has a folk-like singer and a folk-guitarist) and of course, Lorde’s song Royals (that’s on both alternative rock and pop formats now and while it’s not much of a rock song, it’s at least classified as one).  I have young friends, females mind you, sending me these new rock songs saying they love them, when before it was only hip hop they followed.

So I wonder, as new music is starting to sound like the old, with a stronger guitar sound and sexier words and vocals, does time wait for no one, or could it be … a circle?  Is what’s next, what was?  Are we going to replace our stainless steel refrigerator with a new-retro harvest gold model?  Probably not, but rock is waking up from its years-long depression.  What we first loved when we learned to love music, when we learned to love period, is back in taste.  I know what you’re thinking though: it’s recycled, it’s not new.  But I don’t know if that matters.  I haven’t decided that yet.  Perhaps next week, I’ll turn on the TV and see another documentary that gives me the answer.  I will tell you one thing though.  It gives me hope that rock will get on the radio in a more significant way, that people will start to love it again because they hear it.  See unlike those rock star interviews I recently read, I don’t think all of the ego in the world, all the frontman sex appeal, all the showmanship there is matters without the tastes of people wanting it, and for that to happen the people must hear it.  Are we ready?  Are we going to let other artists take over when we know the artists we grew up on invented it?  Will we have new legends?  Will we have new sounds?  Will we have our legends do something that has mass appeal?  Do you have to be young to make this music or can you be older?  How do I know?  I’m just one person, living through time and watching tastes come, go, and perhaps come back again.

But I do think change is on its way.  I think so because — channeling the paraphrased words I am a woman of taste — I know I want to radically redecorate my house, so what does that tell you?