P.S.I.P.O.: Rock and Roll Is Here to Pay, Part II

I wasted part of my Sunday watching YouTube clips of big rock and roll stars inducting other big rock and roll stars into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame™.

Mick Jagger was graceful, fluent, humble, enlightening and entertaining inducting the Beatles, and Paul McCartney moving in the recollections with which he inducted John Lennon. Ringo Starr's acceptance speech reminded me of a barroom soliloquy by an entertaining chap four drinks too amused by his own wit. And Pete Townshend? The man needs help and understanding, or at least he did in 1988.

This was the music of just before my youth, and it's the stuff I grew up listening to. Even Townshend's borderline tasteless jokes were leavened by his humility about the Rolling Stones, whom he inducted. There's something fascinating about watching musicians talking about their own favorite musicians. It's enough to give someone my age the feeling that he knows the people who provided the soundtrack of his youth.

Then the camera would cut to reaction shots of the audience, and I might as well have been looking at a Hollywood fund-raiser for a well-heeled Democratic presidential candidate. I wondered how much it cost to get a table at the front and how prominent a benefactor one had to be. I suspect no one under the age of, say, 45 will remember when listeners were fooled into thinking that rock and roll was about liberation and rebellion. And before you say, "Bruce Springsteen," know that he recently denied a college marching band permission to perform his music, according to the band's director.

Here's a blog post from Bouchercon 2012 and my visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame™, when I wrote that "rebellion has mellowed into concern for property rights." And I just can't bring myself to link to any of the numerous online lists of "The Top(sic) 5/10/20/50 Richest Rock and Roll Stars.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Bouchercon Day 1: Rock and roll is here to pay

Some of us remember when rock and roll stood for rebellion, particularly against greed and corporate interests. But rebellion has mellowed into concern for property rights, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland prohibits photography in almost the entire museum "Due to our agreement with artists and donors."

This led to much good-natured denunciation of the 1960s by me and a crime writer of precisely my age. "Three days of inadequate sanitation, bad food, and lies about the great drugs you never took and the great sex you never had," said I about a certain well-known gathering of the period.

"Oh," said a writer previously unknown to me, beautiful and oh, so very young, "were you at Woodstock?"

"Do I look like Jerry Garcia to you?" I snapped. "That's it; the beard gets shaved off tomorrow."

Besides that reminder of my mortality, the evening's only other disappointment was that, although the exhibits included a number of U2 artifacts, I could find no Paul Hewson postcard to send to Adrian McKinty.

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On the way to the Hall (site of Bouchercon 2012's opening ceremony), I chatted and renewed acquaintance with guitar nut and ZZ Top freak Stuart Neville, a copy of whose forthcoming novel Ratlines I should have in my hands by the weekend.

Highlights of a full day's panelizing included my former panelist Thomas Kaufman's nomination of Louis-Ferdinand Céline as a noir writer and Peter Farris' declaration that "I always considered myself a cosmopolitan redneck in some respects."

My "Murder Is Everywhere" panel happens Saturday (with one substitution due to a family emergency). Tomorrow, I'll look forward to a Books to Die For event plus a panel called "Cop vs. Constable: A Comparison of U.S. and Foreign Laws," with Mark Billingham, Michael Robotham, Peter James, Sara Blaedel, and Michael Connolly. View the complete Bouchercon schedule.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012