Rock as extreme sport

Should rock music come with warning labels? No, not the wimpy "PARENTAL ADVISORY" stickers that get stuck on CDs nowadays. I mean big red labels that say, loud and clear, "WARNING: ROCK, AS A LIFESTYLE, WILL KILL YOU."

I think this is what writer Chuck Klosterman is getting at in his road-trip book on rock, Killing Yourself to Live.

Klosterman is a writer for Spin who believes that rock’s aura vibrates with a certain self-destructive sheen, something that appeals less to girls than to guys, who gravitate towards any activity that is potentially dangerous. In charting the (usually violent) demise of dozens of rock stars in the US – driving across the country to visit the actual places where they bit the big one – he presents rock as the ultimate extreme sport: a pursuit that not only asks for your soul, but demands your body and mind in payment as well.

That’s if you do it right, of course.

We’ve all known someone – usually a high-school buddy – who took the rock thing a little too far. They would wear their hair like Ozzy, or shred their T-shirts like Sid Vicious. They were the ones who got too wasted at concerts, the guys who had to be carried out to the parking lot, sometimes even before the show started. "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom," William Blake (an underrated rock lyricist) once wrote. But sometimes, it also leads to the emergency room.

Getting wasted is only part of the rock mythos, of course. Klosterman (who presents himself as a jock and a bit of a stud, though in his jacket photo he looks like a grown-up version of the character Corey Feldman played in Stand By Me), sets out looking for rock’s dark underbelly: the places in America where bad things happened to rock stars and, often, to rock fans.

Tied up in his search is a subplot about his two girlfriends, and how Klosterman has to choose between them. One, naturally, seems like the right one for him, while the other admits she can never really love him. It’s the kind of mental and emotional anguish that makes you want to cue Nazareth’s version of Love Hurts in the background.

And what rock book would be complete without the third item in the unholy trilogy – drugs? During the course of his "research" Klosterman does cocaine in a graveyard, the place marking where 100 fans died in a blaze during a 2003 Great White concert in West Warwick, Rhode Island. He smokes up a lot of weed, which he finds "therapeutic" to his work. Talk about living the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.

Mentally, Klosterman gets pretty far out there on "the edge." He first hits the Chelsea Hotel in lower Manhattan, famous because, among other things, Sex Pistol Sid Vicious murdered his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in Room 100 there. But, as he learns from the concierge, "There is no Room 100. They converted it into an apartment 18 years ago." The concierge despises the rock "cultists" who visit the Chelsea to see the room: "These are not serious-minded people. You will find that they are not trying to understand anything about death. They are looking for nothing."

But who says enjoying rock music and looking for nothing are mutually exclusive?

Killing Yourself to Live is a fun read when the narrator buys into his thesis, becoming part of the story and making himself kind of a gibbering wreck in the process. Over three weeks of driving through Georgia, Mississippi, Minneapolis, North Dakota and finally Seattle (home to many a rock death), he gets pretty unhinged, playing the 600 CDs he packed along for the car trip (he claims ignorance about loading his iPod), singing along to Steve Miller (Keep on Rocking Me), or the Doobie Brothers (China Grove) or, of course, Led Zeppelin’s Heartbreaker.

Zeppelin plays a key role in Klosterman’s masculine view of rock mythology – particularly that point in every young man’s life which he calls "The Zeppelin Phase":

Every straight man born after the year 1958 has at least one transitory period in his life when he believes that Led Zeppelin is the only good band that ever existed. And there is no other rock group that generates that experience… For whatever reason, there is a point in the male maturation process when the music of Led Zeppelin sounds like the perfect actualization of the perfectly cool you.

Yes, Robert Plant haircuts may come and go, but the music of Zep lives on forever, dude.

The fitting finale to his death surf across USA is Seattle, where countless grunge bands went belly-up via drug overdoses. Kurt Cobain’s shotgun suicide was probably the most graphic example, and served as a kind of watershed moment for Generation X. According to Klosterman, Cobain’s dying "seemed to give total strangers a sense of integrity they had never wanted while he was alive."

Perhaps this is because young people’s lives generally lack a story arc, and the death of rock stars – usually under quasi-mythical circumstances – provides evidence that such a story arc can exist.

I myself will admit to spending way too much time (on my honeymoon, mind you) seeking out the gravestone of Doors singer Jim Morrison among the slopes of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. (Morrison apparently OD’d in a Paris bathtub in 1971.)

Why do this, you may ask. Because, I would answer, rock becomes part of our lives, especially male lives; and aspects of its mythology can provide a glimpse of the continuity of our existence. We think we live deeper lives, maybe, by knowing the details of our rock heroes’ lives – and their deaths.

Put another way, we don’t just live vicariously through rock stars’ lives, but through their deaths as well. And sharing in that sense of danger is often as risky as our lives get.

Even writing seems a poor substitute for living the rock life. At one point, Klosterman’s ex-girlfriend asks him what the point is of writing "a nonfiction book that will be unfavorably compared to Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity." Well, like Hornby, Klosterman does wear his rock-and-roll heart on his sleeve. And like Hunter S. Thompson (another road-tripper who wove drugs and rock music into his increasingly surreal narrative), he does speak for a certain type of young male, probably white, probably American. He never really makes any super-deep observations, but at least he seems to have fun, most of the time, and that’s pretty much all we should hope to expect from rock and roll.