Let Go and Let Rock
New bands remaking old sounds prove the classics never go out of style
By Dean Kuipers
When the boys in Australia's Jet first put their band together in the suburbs of Melbourne in the mid-1990s, American grunge and postpunk dominated rock radio and rock star was an idea mired in conflict. Frontmen like Eddie Vedder, Chris Cornell, and Kurt Cobain stalked stages in unraveling sweaters and work boots, the anti-star stars, making excessive political work of casting out the demons of bad-boy blues-rock excess - just as teen brothers Chris and Nic Cester were working furiously to conjure them up again.
The Cesters' was the original working-class rock 'n' roll dream, the one that still looks an awful lot like the Rolling Stones in Gimme Shelter or, even better, Cocksucker Blues: beautiful young men - adults, not children, not Mickey Mouse Club graduates! - in their bell-bottom hiphuggers and long hair, bodies like asps in junkie repose, the jet loaded with the most beautiful women in the world in various states of undress, their total hedonistic vision like a Babylonian garden and a serious threat to the straights. As Billy Corgan - whose pain-as-validation message places him squarely among the conflicted - once told me: "I never thought of Jimmy Page as being depressed. I imagined him on a jet, drinking whiskey with nude women."
Exactly. And playing riffs he reworked or even straight-up ripped off from Muddy Waters or Albert King with conviction and love and a total lack of irony. Well, by the late '90s, the Cesters were working shit jobs like driving forklifts, and they needed their lives saved by that vision - the whole opera, from rags to riches, a libretto written by Bowie and Springsteen with towering fuzz-guitar by Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson. Luckily for them, there was another Australian band about, You Am I, pulling huge crowds and showing them a way forward by not copping the American style and just playing what felt right.
Jet broke through on its infectious, garageist hit, "Are You Gonna Be My Girl," but the other 12 tracks on its 2003 debut, Get Born, spoke another language altogether - the language of Pink Floyd, the Stones, Queen, Humble Pie, AC/DC ... and also their mid-'90s analogues, like Oasis, the Verve, Lenny Kravitz, and the Black Crowes. Jet was neo-classical and no apologies: Chris Cester even appears in the Jimmy Page Air-Force-cap-with-shades get-up, a kind of declaration in itself.
"Didn't care, you know?" drawls Jet bassist Mark Wilson in his Aussie twist. "We felt you make music for yourself, rather than someone else. Still do."
They're in some pretty decent company. Several of the more notable bands giving consistently great shows at the moment share their taste for unapologetically glammy, late-'60s/early-'70s silk-scarf blues rock, including Kings of Leon, Eagles of Death Metal, My Morning Jacket, and even the garage-metal of fellow Aussie act Wolfmother.
Others showing distinctly classic-rock roots are OK Go (Cheap Trick, Queen), Butch Walker (T. Rex), Band of Horses (Neil Young and Crazy Horse), the Hold Steady (Bruces Springsteen and Hornsby), the Redwalls (Beatles and more Beatles), L.E.O. (E.L.O.), the Darkness (Slade), and the Raconteurs, with their smart sonic shifts from '60s radio pop to timeless acoustic rockers.
Though these groups may share stages and sell-by dates with a whole mess of contemporaries, they are distinct from the new-wave-inflected dance-y madness of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Arctic Monkeys, Strokes, Every Move a Picture, Vines, KaiserFerdinandLashes, etc.; from the Coldplay-ish drone of Keane or Augustana; and from all those emo bands that channel the Cure.
Instead, bands like Kings of Leon are reaching back to both the bluesy material that inspired the Stones, Cream, the Who, and Queen - and to their belief in rock as a transcendent, un-deconstructed text - rechanneling it through their own experience. In the case of the Kings, the upbringing of the Followill brothers as sons of a traveling revival preacher gives them direct access to the gospel plaint assumed by Mick Jagger or Robert Plant. Their passion for this material is also uncut by punk skepticism: Kept away from modern rock radio until the new millennium, when the oldest, Nathan, was about 20, the Followills absorbed Zeppelin and the Stones and the whole history of rock in one giant bong hit and were appropriately blasted - a spell that shows no signs of wearing off.
Indeed, Kings of Leon have plunged headlong into the lifestyle like kids in a candy store, helping themselves to the rock-star spoils - occasionally worrying in print that their much-revered mother might get the wrong idea with all those gorgeous girls hanging around. (She should.) Similarly, Jet also quickly started appearing in tabloid photos that could have been taken during the 1973 Exile on Main St. tour.
"We don't do that because we want to emulate anybody," Jet's Wilson jumps in, before I can even finish the question. "We were like this before we were a band. We'd do it on the weekends, because we had to go to work during the week. Now we've taken away the week, and we still carry on the same."
Others, like OK Go, are more affected in their choices, working from a knowing postpunk stance, which acknowledges that a little bit of tribute band is not the worst thing in the world.
"When left to our own devices, we write [an album] that sounds like a mix-tape of all our favorite bands," says OK Go bassist Tim Nordwind. "Like, 'That's the Prince song. That's the Cheap Trick song. That's the T. Rex song.' We rely on production to sort of bring it all together."
The Eagles of Death Metal, fronted by lapsed political journalist Jesse Hughes, explode the whole idea of "homage" by finding the absurd glam triumph in even the most weirdly non-linear of songs ("The Ballad of Queen Bee and Baby Duck") and turning it into a kind of psychotic event. Neo-classicism can be as complex as a beautiful twist on a familiar sound, like My Morning Jacket's dazzling melding of postpunk and Pink Floyd, or as simple as an attitude: Babyshambles' Pete Doherty knocks together every style from dance hall to blues poetry, but every one of his pasty, just-out-of-lockup photos screams ROCK STAR! as loud as any old shot of
Keith Moon in a top hat.
The Hold Steady's Craig Finn seems to almost purposely drive his listeners back in time, borrowing the sound and earnest storytelling of Springsteen and opening the band's just-released album by referencing Jack Kerouac's classic Beat text On the Road: "There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right/boys and girls in America, they're such a sad time together."
"That's the whole fun part about rock 'n' roll," affirms Nordwind. "I always thought it was really cool when Nirvana said that 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was a complete salute to a Pixies song.
"It's pretty awesome," he continues, "when you tell a kid in Boston, 'You gotta go listen to Electric Warrior by T. Rex,' and the next time you're in Boston the kid says, 'You blew my fuckin' mind with Electric Warrior.' Then you feel like you've done some good! You've done your little part."
Published: 10/05/2006
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