Rock And Roll Will Never Die?

That's not entirely true. So you need to soak it up when you get the chance

For the last couple of years I've been discreetly doing something rather macabre.

To be clear, I'm not one of those people who drives around rural highways looking for roadkill they can strip the flesh off of to create raccoon skull necklaces. Nor am I holding Ouija board seances in graveyards.

No, what I've been doing is trying to see various classic rockers before they die.  

It all started innocently enough. In 1999, the Chart crew crossed the country on the Edgefest tour featuring Hole. The tour ended in Vancouver and it just so happened that a couple days after Edgefest, Ozzfest was rolling in with a reunited Black Sabbath. In those days I was more about the Canadian rock of Tricky Woo, The Flashing Lights and Danko Jones. The new Nine Inch Nails, Flaming Lips, Blur and Mogwai albums were contemporary cool, too. Sure, I loved Sabbath's "Iron Man" from back when I was a kid, but the thought of seeing a bunch of black-clad old men onstage was mostly a "meh." I had moved on.

That is, until I actually saw them.

Ozzy was wobbling all over and swearing like a crazy man and Tony Iommi's riffs were wicked. The songs were deadly heavy and the crowd was insane. If you can imagine, what I felt watching Black Sabbath was sort of like what a paleontologist would feel if they woke up, looked out their window and saw a bunch of velociraptors running around their backyard. Sure they're a bunch of dinosaurs, but they're a fucking awesome bunch of dinosaurs.

A few years later, courtesy of a hook-up from Chart photog Richard Beland, I had front row seats to see Diamond Dave (David Lee Roth) perform. That show was even better.

Watching the Rothman, I realized how misguided my hubris was as it related to these classic rockers. Being a studied music fan, I had all their records, but the idea of seeing these "classic" acts play live was never cool. I mean, what's the point of seeing the gnarled, grey, money-grubbing Rolling Stones when they were their most bad-ass evil almost 40 years earlier at Altamont? And why bother with AC/DC if
Bon Scott was dead? But what I realized while seeing Roth scissor-kick through "Panama" was that I was completely wrong. Getting to see and hear "Under My Thumb" doesn't lose its lustre over time. Neither does hearing an angry version of "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap."

Amongst rock 'n' roll fans, there's always been a premium on the "I saw-them-when" factor. Y'know, "I saw Nirvana at Lee's Palace when someone threw a bottle at them." Or "I saw Jesus And Mary Chain when Jim Reid clobbered a fan with a mic stand." Or "I saw The White Stripes play to nine people at the El Mocambo." But I've realized the premium shouldn't be on the whose-got-the-bigger-penis of seeing an artist first or at the smallest club, but rather it should be about simply seeing these great, legendary, sometimes transcendent artists while you still have a chance.

In recent months I've heard Bob Dylan play "All Along The Watchtower," watched Pete Townshend windmill his way through "My Generation" and gawked as Iron Maiden's mascot Eddie transformed into a giant stage-consuming tank commander (tough to explain, incredible to witness).

And it's directly because of these experiences that I want to see Stompin' Tom Connors kick the snot out of a plywood board, hear dirty old Chuck Berry do "My Ding-A-Ling," have David Bowie play "Ziggy Stardust" and Neil Diamond croon "Solitary Man" before they die. Heck, even having the bloody ejaculate from Gwar's heat-seeking moisture missiles shot at me is on the must-do list.

The turbulent sea that is the music world means I'll never get to see The Clash, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Bob Marley or hundreds of others in my record collection play live. And that's why I want to see the Robert Plants and the Paul McCartneys before they croak. I know the music they make nowadays sucks. And I know that if I go see those people I'll have to sit through concerts half-built around said new music. But if you're a true music fan, saying you got to hear "Stairway To Heaven" or "Hey Jude" live, at any time, has a lot more value than never having seen those performances at all.

This was my editorial column from the February 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. You can purchase the issue at the Chart Shop.