Photographs and memories (2)

I don't mention Charles Gordon to discredit him. That would be like hunting butterflies with a shotgun. I mention it because it is a good example of just how silly we used to get about rock music. When I was in high school, Doobie Brothers fans considered themselves morally superior to people who went to discos. Really!

And not just a little morally superior. Hester Prine never went through the kind of moral disapprobation that these guys (they were almost all guys, girls were more into dancing than moral disdain) leveled at anyone who listened to disco. A guy at school with me actually vandalized a car because he heard the driver listening to disco.

At the end of the that era, guitar-based rock music came back and there was much rejoicing in some circles. And then a group called The Knack had a hit with the song My Sharona. That song attracted more anger than five years of disco had done.

A local rock critic produced a piece in which he claimed, with great authority, that The Knack were a manufactured phenomenon not unlike the Monkees intended to cash in on the efforts of other, presumably more authentic, musicians. The article was must discussed by music geeks of my acquaintance.

One of the things that really angered this critic was the cover photo (which you can see above). He imagined millions of people buying the record and being so stupid as to believe that the model on the cover was Sharona.

Well, it was Sharona.That is the song writer's (then underage) girlfriend. I didn't know this until the song writer and leader of the band died. He was real rock buff. He lived for the stuff the way very few normal people would do. The irony is that the people in my town who hated him with a passion were the guys who were exactly like him (except for their not actually having enough talent to play anything but a sound system).

I think their hatred was motivated by something else. Rock music is like potato chips. There is nothing wrong with chomping down on them so long as you don't pretend they are gourmet food.

You can sort of get away with deceiving yourself about this if you listen to obscure or cultish rock.

This is why some people loved John Lennon but sneered at the vastly more talented Paul McCartney, whose songs sold many more copies than the other three Beatles. You can tell yourself that the proof that your music really is special is that most people don't get it. For the guys who listened to punk/new wave music in the late 1970s, My Sharona ruined all that. When it became popular, they reacted the same way they would have done had they found out their girlfriend had become popular by putting out for the whole school.

(Assuming they had girlfriends which most music geeks, being geeks after all, did not.)