THE ROCK AND ROLL LIFE: MYTH OR REALITY

Many musicians you talk to these days will tell you the same thing: The days of rock and roll glamour are over.  They’ll tell you that touring, publicity appearances, recording and sales are a full-time job of hard work and long hours.  Weblogs, communities such as MySpace, texting, instant-messaging and email have only added to the musician’s workload even as they have given artists new opportunities to reach fans.  And fans have gained marked importance to Rock Musicians, compared with their relevance to the process in the previous two decades.

But in Rock’s last great Golden Age of Glam, the 1980s, bands like Motley Crue and Aerosmith had time to work hard and party harder, didn’t they?  Or was the rock and roll lifestyle just a myth, an affectation used to sell records?

That’s what I set out to learn, after interviewing Ryan Barkwell of Idle Sons and Mat Joly of Mobile. They both told similar stories about life as a working musician; just how much of a real job it is; like many of us, they put in long hours.  Like some of us, they’re lucky enough to enjoy what they’re doing for a living.  Like most of us, they find the work’s hard and the money’s okay, but not great.

As Ryan puts it: “a band like us, we have to be out on the road, we have to be promoting, we have to be getting in front of people and that sort of thing.  We sell a lot more records off the stage than we do in retail so for us, it’s really just given us a firm direction and we work closely in partnership with our managers and with our label and formed a little strategy that outlines exactly what we need to do to get the elusive Gold Record which is extremely hard to do these days.”

When I was a kid growing up, rock stars were living the high life during the heyday of the 1980s Glam Rock era: bands like Motley Crue, Poison, Quiet Riot and Cinderella, to name a few, were known for partying hard with groupies, booze and drugs, getting into all kinds of trouble as they struggled to maintain their lavish lifestyles and musical careers.

For a good long while, hardly a week seemed to go by without someone being arrested, hospitalized or even killed by or because of their excesses.  If you peruse a list of young Rock Stars who died in the 1980s and 1990s: You’ll find that those who died in the last twenty years are more likely to have died because of drugs or alcohol, or in an accident or altercation relating to drugs and alcohol: John Bonham of Led Zeppelin; Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy; Andrew Wood of Mother Love Bone; Kurt Cobain of Nirvana; Shannon Hoon of Blind Melon and Kurt Winter of the Guess Who, just to name a few.

In the first few years of the Twenty-First Century, the litany of dead Rock Stars holds very few musicians who have died because of drugs or alcohol.  In fact, more Rock Stars have died from natural causes these past few years than anything else.  There are notable exceptions, like Lane Stanley of Alice in Chains or John Entwistle of The Who, but again, these are veteran Rockers.  If anything, this first decade of the New Millennium has thusfar been notable because very few young Rockers have died.