Rock stardom for dummies
SUPERNATURAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING A ROCK ‘N’ ROLL GROUP
By Ian F. Svenonius
Akashic Books, 250 pages
Rock ‘n’ roll chemistry. If they could bottle it, people say, you could sell the formula and make millions. What makes one supergroup — like Cream — click, while others — like Power Station — just suck?
What does it take to conjure up rock magic? The answers may surprise you, or at least amuse you, in Ian F. Svenonius’ Supernatural Strategies. It’s a tongue-in-cheek how-to manual, to be sure, on the components of rock imaging and myth-making (whole sections are devoted to taking “The Group Photo” and “Naming the Band”). But it’s also a bit spooky, as it delves into the supernatural world via a supposed “séance” held to conjure up tips from famous dead rock stars. In fact, the bulk of this guide is culled from a marathon session with rock ‘n’ roll’s biggest (and deadest) names: Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin and the like.
Who is the author? A rock writer, naturally, but also a musician (in Chain and The Gang) — someone in a position to have encountered every variety of rock excess, the ingredients of success and failure, and the peculiarities of personality and desperation that can often result in… great bands.
Yes, personality clashes can be a boon to a great band. Witness the Who, the Rolling Stones and even the songwriting rivalry within the Beatles. But even more key to a band’s success, the book tells us, is an air of death. That’s right: a little breath from the crypt can add mystery and mystique to a band. Fortunately for rock ‘n’ roll, death is a frequent visitor. That’s why Svenonius holds a purported séance to gather data from the departed, and it’s a lengthy list. Certainly, having a band member die can spell the end, as it did with Nirvana and The Doors, but it also boosts record sales immeasurably. It’s often been said: death is a great career move in rock ‘n’ roll.
But Supernatural Strategies points out that the manner of a musician’s death is key. Suicide is a tricky proposition, as it often unleashes just as much fan resentment as it does sympathy. “Even in the long term, if the mode of death is strange or unsavory, morbid associations might hamper adulation,” the writer states. “You must die in a way which won’t turn fans off.” Overdosing on pills or drowning (e.g. Jeff Buckley) are seen as “sympathetically tragic” while electrocution (The Yardbirds’ Keith Relf) is viewed as “doltish.” Certainly, perishing in plane crashes has helped many rockers’ reputations — Buddy Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Indeed, breaking up a band is a kind of “death rehearsal,” with attendant emotional resonance. Ziggy Stardust did it, as did the Clash and Simon & Garfunkel.
It’s worthwhile asking why death is so inextricably linked with rock ‘n’ roll. “The death cult in rock is one of its most important aspects and is borne of the medium’s potent sexual power,” claims Svenonius. It may also have something to do with the emotional nature of adolescence, a time when death and its imagery have stronger drawing power. It’s a bit harder to get into Black Sabbath lyrics when you’re 50.
In a way, Svenonius has written a snarky cousin to C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, wherein a demon is given instructions by The Dark One on how to recruit more souls into damnation — namely by playing on human folly. But while Supernatural Strategies is ironic in structure, there’s a great deal of truthiness to it, and the advice is often spot-on.
You want to make it big? First, take the right band photo. That’s right: before songs comes your image, says the chapter titled “The Band Photo as Unveiling.” In it, you capture your essence in a few minimalist strokes. Do you go for a brooding collective shot, sans instruments? Or a “rocking” take, instruments in hand? If it’s a heavy metal band, do you stand shoulder to shoulder in a straight line, to suggest your solidity and oneness of purpose? Or do you go for a goofy prop shot like The Monkees or One Direction? Careful how you take that first picture, because “like the entrails of an animal sacrifice read by an oracle, your photograph will be pored over by interested parties.”
Next is your name. Even if you are technically “a band,” Svenonius warns, naming the band is “not a committee activity.” It’s best left to the group’s visionary/genius. “The name has to appear in a dream or a revelation. Some effective name-generating strategies could be: inducing fever, eating mold, enduring a sweat lodge, running until exhausted while being chased by police, autoasphyxiation, or temporary insanity...”
Funny, yes. But also true. Rock is hardly ever a democracy, unless you’re the Grateful Dead or Fugazi. It takes a few weirdo elements, such as a visionary or malcontent who’s dead certain about his vision. You need a Jim Morrison, dropping peyote in the desert with his bandmates like a rock shaman. You need a John Lydon, leering and hunched over the mic like Richard III. An Ian Curtis type droning about dead souls. A real a-hole like Roger Waters. Ego fuels genius, or at least musters enough facsimile genius to fuel a number of great rock bands.
What struck me about Supernatural Strategies is its insistence that a band needs to know exactly what it wants to project, from the first moment. It’s all about creating a myth for yourself, or what Svenonius calls a “trapped in amber” moment that captures the soul of the band. One thinks back on the inspiration that led Hendrix to light up his guitar at Monterey, Elvis Presley to release his hips, or Iggy Pop to smear peanut butter all over his chest and invent stage-diving. Certainly, rock’s greatest are caught up in the energy of the moment, something that helps them to propel themselves into the consciousness. Patti Smith famously said she watched Jim Morrison perform with The Doors somewhere in Greenwich Village back in 1968 and told herself, “I can do that.” Not: “What he’s doing is so amazing and unique.” Rather, she saw a way to stake her own claim in rock ‘n’ roll. And that’s what rock history is populated with: people who invented (or reinvented) themselves as mythical characters.
The author reserves a special scorn for music critics (“Who are these music critics, and who asked them, anyway?”), who have magically proliferated in our era of blogging and “curators” of hipster tastes. “The modern critic often sees himself or herself as translating the experience of sound into something their reader (too thick to really ‘get it’) can understand.” Yet bands need critics to hate, just as they need a status quo to rebel against.
Among the success nuggets you get in Supernatural Strategies is the importance of astrology in forming a band: air signs (John and Paul) balance well with water signs (George and Ringo), for instance. But mostly you’re looking for the right level of commitment. “Some of your collaborators might be refugees from awful jobs, insipid record collections, religious sects. Your group will be their last hope, and their might ne desperation in their eyes,” he writes. “These are the ones you want.”
Another theory involves the intertwining of sex and rock music. “It is a central mythos of the music that rock ‘n’ roll groups must behave as if they are sex maniacs and then regale their biographers with epics of erotic barbarity.” Au contraire, says the author: “Rock ‘n’ roll is not sex, but a replacement for sex.” Good performers preserve their “chi” energy for the stage and recording. In fact, the ready availability of sex nowadays is “the culprit for contemporary music being so revoltingly mediocre.”
Hey, he might be onto something there. There are stranger theories in the supernatural world.
