November 13th – I’ve always thought there was
something intrinsically creepy about people who do look-a-like sessions, of any
sort, for a living, but my barometer of creepiness goes up when the look-alike
spills over into the music scene.
Bands who do accurate covers of the music of once-famous
bands, so-called tribute bands, are
one thing, but bands who put on their chosen copy-cat-band’s costume, make-up
and mannerisms in order to imitate once-famous individuals (particularly if
that person is long dead) are in another category altogether. All of us, or
most of us maybe (sorry, didn’t mean to make assumptions) most of us have
musical regrets. Like, I’d really liked to have been around when Mozart was
giving the classical world some stick but if I had then I would’ve missed Jimi
Hendrix…and that just doesn’t bear thinking about.
What’s happened to a greater degree over the past ten or so
years is that, like the instant replay we’ve come to expect in our various
forms of visual/digital entertainment, we want to recall times and events that
we missed first time round because…well because we weren’t born at the time. We
want them re-created time after time after time and so we watch endless remakes
of classic movies and go to geriatric, pension-tour rock shows where 70-year
old rockers try to recreate their heyday, happy to fool the audience and
themselves that they’re right back in the day and even happier to be pocketing
the cheque at the end of it.
And this state of affairs isn’t helped by those who were
around at the time harping on non-stop about how good those times were; reminds
me of that lovely ‘T’ shirt slogan:
THE OLDER I GET THE
BETTER I WAS.
Thing is, to the people who experienced that music first time
round, in those times and at their age, of course they’re the best times of
their musical life; of course they were. You were of an age when these sounds,
these bands were new, cutting edge, dangerous, whatever. Just like the young
people of today who consider they’re living through the best times of their
musical life when, in many cases and just like our parents, all we can hear is
a row…
Not like it was in my
day’
we scoff…and, as far as music is concerned there’s a grain of
truth in that bald statement.
The bands and solo artists of the 50’s/60’s/70’s formed the
foundation to the music that’s played today. It’s the backbone in the skeleton
of rock, no matter how much Punk tried to deny it, and from that foundation has
fleshed out what we have now. Its part of rock’s DNA, as important and integral
as the central nervous system attached to a skeleton and body formed by the
political and social events of the time. Don’t know about you but, back in the
60’s (FM here he goes) back in the
60’s, I really thought I could change things, y’know? As in make a difference. The sad thing is it
seems that today young people don’t believe that, and that’s because
politicians have crowded them out of the decision-making process through
secrecy, lies, subterfuge and levels of surveillance and control that I, for
one, never thought I’d see outside of a totalitarian state; never. Nowadays
young people feel powerless, welded to their mobile ’phones and consumed with
dreams of a long-promised-Porsche-for-nothing whilst drowning in a waterfall of
choice that’s just there to keep them
befuddled, to keep their eye off’f what’s really going on in the country…in the
world. So the great nostalgia-fest revisits those times and look-alike, sound-alike
performers are everywhere, recreating the recreated sounds of the great bands
and events of yesteryear for an audience whose consciousness is assuaged for
the 60 minute trip down someone else’s memory lane and are left with a feeling
of emptiness because, in honesty, it was much, much more than just about the
music. The music was just a soundtrack to change…now it’s just a soundtrack.
Maybe one of the lessons we could all do with learning is
just sometimes how to live in the present. How to, as far as our own lives are
concerned, ditch the past, disregard the future and live for the moment. It’s
harder than it sounds, certainly for any length of time, but it’s surprising
the level of immediacy it adds to ones everyday.
Moments seem sharper, events more colourful, emotions more
precious and I think that was one of the defining things. That back in the 60’s
when it was all fresh, when anything
seemed possible, when life seemed razor-sharp and when opinion, solution and
outcome had the ability to turn through 90 degrees in an instant because,
probably, it was happening to us for the first time and we felt part of that
change. We really felt part of the solution (part of the problem too but
working on it). When those things are recycled, endlessly, by copies of the
real thing, they become just chewing-gum for the senses, the sincerity wrung
out of them by poor imitations wailing into a nostalgic void.
So it came as some light relief to all this angst I’ve just
scribbled about look-alikes and such nonsense when I read that, on this day in
1974, an imposter posing as Ritchie Blackmore (fabled guitarist of Deep Purple) crashed a Porsche he’d
borrowed from fan he’d hoodwinked having already conned food and shelter from
several other Deep Purple fans. Now,
I don’t know about you but if I met Ritchie Blackmore and he was friendly
enough to want to talk to me and then to take me out for a drink I’d figure, on
the salary he was earning, he’d be buying, wouldn’t you? I’d also figure he’d
be living it up in the penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria so, when he asked
could he doss on my settee for the night and have a borrow of my steak and
onion pie, never mind my Porsche, I’d get suspish… wouldn’t you?
They wanted a piece of history, I guess, these fans. A place
they could revisit in their old age and say;
Yup, I was there. I was
part of the story
Even if they did end up with a fucked-over Porsche and no
pie.
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