HUMAN WRECKAGE

“Rock Show”

In our petite portion of the great cosmic swirl that is the Milky Way, we orbit our sun between our elliptical neighbours Venus and Mars. These two planets were also the title of Paul McCartney’s sixth solo album, released in 1975. It’s an important record in his catalogue if only because his previous one, the justifiably massive Band on the Run, may have played back in his mind as a mixed blessing, a world-wide hit but perhaps an albatross too.

A close personal friend and confidante quickly dubbed Wing’s new album Penis and Mars. Oh, the rapier wit of 15-year-old boys; alas, nearly five decades later I know it by no other name. As for the actual title, I have no idea whether McCartney is referencing our solar system, alluding to our two traditional human genders or had simply found Mars a particularly easy proper noun to rhyme. For all I know, all of the above. I mean I had no idea “Blackbird” that lovely and fragile song from The Beatles was about the civil rights movement in the United States until he said so.

I dread the idea of attending a concert in this day and age. A ducat used to be had for a couple of hours of part-time work. Now a fan is forced to contemplate skipping a weekly mortgage payment. There remain the lurking spectres of terrorist acts and aerosol disease droplets. What’s worse though is the prospect of mingling with middle-aged sad sacks much like myself whose Fitbits are pretty much, you know, digital updates of complimentary funeral home wall calendars. I’ve been listening to Penis and Mars frequently recently and it is evocative of a time when my palms were hairier than my now IHOP-senior-discount-worthy nostrils and ear lobes.

I can’t go back, but the anthemic “Rock Show” has taken me halfway there. To mix allegories, allusions, analogies and metaphors, the song is more cartoon than documentary. Colour photographs in Circus magazine, black vinyl and radio ether, but, good God y’all, to actually go to a show! “Rock Show” spoke to me and for me; it expressed stuff I was too inarticulate to explain to anyone, let alone myself. And those fantastical tickets came with reservations, even then “Silly Willy and the Philly Band” sounded suspect. And what and where on Earth was “The Concertgebouw” anyway? Maybe the song’s enduring charm for me is its “Get Back” coda chatter, “Put your dress on, we’re going to the rock show….I’ve got tickets…”

Queen was a band that made me cringe. I thought they were too bombastic, too over-the-top to be taken seriously. Like Kiss, but better musicians. Of course, flamboyant excess is the sole ethos of rock. If I still recorded mix tapes, I’d follow “Rock Show” with “We Will Rock You.” These are trite songs but they are inclusive and self-aware, Wings and Queen are having a one-sided conversation with their audiences: “We get it.” The lines of communication were somewhat open, though neither one could lay a bloody finger upon Alice Cooper’s megachurch greeting “Hello Hooray.”

There’s a lyric fragment in “Rock Show” that always suggests Ziggy Stardust to me: “In my green metal suit I’m preparing to shoot up the city…” I don’t know why; Bowie’s resplendent in a quilted sky blue spacesuit on the cover. Then again, there’s a green door to his left. Maybe I saw a photograph in Hit Parader. But who could understand adolescent alienation better than an alien, a little green man?

I suppose that prior to the rise of punk, Alice, Wings and Queen were democratic in their own remote rock stardom way, a couple of chords and a catchy catch-all phrase. Pete Townshend of the Who has always fretted about his band’s relationship with its base (“Long Live Rock,” “Join Together”), but the other contemporary aristocrats, the Stones, Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Aerosmith, were too messed up and self-absorbed to care.

Duke Ellington wrote “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” in 1940. McCartney covered this jazz standard on his Soviet Melodyia release CHOBA B CCCP in 1988; pipes of peace and all that although I’ve a hunch Comrade Putin didn’t part with any hard earned KGB rubles to acquire the disc. Around that time I punched out of the night shift and hustled the few blocks to the Montreal Forum hoping to buy a couple of advance McCartney tickets. Their cost would’ve equated to hand-bombing a few skids of goods from the back of a truck, a couple of hours of pay topped up with a night premium. Well, didn’t the end of the line which I’d just joined rub up against its start: Ste-Catherine to Closse to de Maisonneuve to Atwater and back to Ste-Catherine. There was no way I’d be “sitting in the stands of the sports arena, waiting for the show to begin.”

McCartney, fittingly, was the last big rock show I attended. The price of admission was eye-watering. But it was him - albeit long past his best before date. Scoring an ounce and swilling strawberry wine - or any teenage-flavoured hootch, or any seventies rock show behaviour - was out of the question in this post-9/11 paranoid nanny state era. I suppose all these restrictions imposed sans irony by aged baby boomers blessed by a bit of influence and power serve a sort of purpose: experience has taught me that nasal vomiting is unpleasant; its bile burns sensitive internal tissue on its way up and there’s no escaping its smell.

Was that an amplified Liverpudlian accent or the slack jawed clacking on an old man’s cosmetic dentistry? McCartney’s rock show delivered plenty of nostalgia because that’s all he’s got left to sell. Beyond the time travel fuelled by his remarkable song catalogue, I experienced further, unexpected pangs from my, perhaps, ill-spent and liberally squandered youth. The venue’s staff, most of whom were half my age, sported dark uniforms offset by tennis ball green safety vests. They were dutifully diligent as they went about enforcing the landlord’s rules, provincial regulations and municipal bylaws. I did not appreciate being treated like a teenager again. 

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of pop music musings since 2013. My novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com to find your preferred format and retailer.