BACKWHENISM:
Mapping the Album Covers of Classic Rock Youth
When the needle hits the spinning black vinyl there's a hiss and crackle through the speakers, and then the quiet sounds of ocean tides lapping in and out, and finally the first notes of Quadrophenia fill the room, opening up into a full blown three-hour confessional odyssey of power chords, lovely piano interludes, delicate finger picking, crashing drums, sad majestic horns, and Pete Townsend’s heartbreaking lyrics, “Every year, it's the same and I feel it again, I'm a loser, no chance to win, Leaves start falling, comedown is calling, Loneliness starts sinking in.”
I have not listened to this quadruple album with the monochrome scooter boy on the cover in like four decades, and hearing it I am transported right back to our shitty little cinder block dorm room in Erie, Pennsylvania with my roomie Danno Wright. I had forgotten about this epic, operatic work that dive bombs the alienation of growing up and tells the story of the Mods' outsider subculture. Quadrophenia is a profound, raw, massive album, a defining example of the rock opera format, a unified whole work. Most of all, the album captured a mood and feeling back in the day that we kids understood deeply. On the far side of 60, I spend a fair amount of mental energy in a retrospective mode. I’m aware of the tedium of “backwhenism,” the refuge of an old fuck like me. You know, ‘hey kid let me tell you about the good old days....’ Yeah yeah. Even knowing this, I am going down the rabbit hole of considering the album covers of my younger days—yes, the tired old topic of classic Rock 'n Roll music. In recent years my listening has mainly been in what's vaguely called alternative, indie, and Americana, but in this state of heightened memory, the old mantras and battle cries echo back across my aging mind: Freebird! Stairway! We will rock you! It may in fact be true that "Rock 'n Roll never forgets" because I’m travelling down the dark tunnel of music history, from Spotify past iPods and CDs and cassette tapes and the unfortunate 8-track tape, back to a golden age of the phonograph and the record collection. Albums were pretty central for a kid who graduated high school in 1982, in the heart of the classic rock period of pop music (or maybe just a little after) when your record collection was your most prized possession, curated and fawned over in a way that just doesn’t translate in the transactional era of songs beamed down from the anonymous cloud. We had these amazing record collections, giant rows of 33 RPM vinyl records, stored in wood crates, or arrayed carefully on DIY shelves made of planks stacked on old bricks, right next to an ever expanding set of components—turntable, amp, woofer, subwoofer, receiver, equalizer, speakers—and of course the bong. In Pittsburgh, your albums were a subset of what was playing on WDVE, the local flagship FM rock station, always referred to by the shorthand of DVE. Your record collection was everything. It was your very identity. 
Being in high school in the early 1980's was not that different from today, in terms of having to navigate across the Dazed and Confused landscape of cliques and archetypes—the jocks, nerds, burnouts, gearheads, the pervasive awkwardness of fronting various adolescent personas like trying on somebody else’s hand-me-downs. We were stupid kids just trying to get laid and trying to be cool--same as it ever was. And like today, music was how we coped, survived, and articulated the odd experience of growing up before we could really understand it. Rock ‘n Roll baptized us into a world of defiance, danger, possibility, confessional honesty, and flamboyant style. The albums themselves offered a physical type of storytelling missing in digital music, which is a common refrain of today’s bespoke vinyl revival. A record album is a self-contained format and package, a thing of heady graphic design beauty. We didn’t know it then but in the early 1980’s we were living through the fading of so-called classic rock—all the arena guitar bands, the British supergroup invasion, the expansive rock sound spawned from the Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, Dylan and all the way back to Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Elvis and the blues legends. And what was coming in to replace those iconic bands was punk, new wave, experimental art rock, hip hop, early emo, and a multiplicity of other emerging genres. It is well advised to remember that the concept of “oldies” is a moving target. When we were kids, the 1950s do-wap sound was the most deeply uncool stuff your lame parents listened to, disparaged after only 20 years as “oldies.” Classic rock is the same thing for kids today, churned over by 50 years of newer music. The once fresh tracks and ear worms now cut tired, cliched grooves in the brain. Keep that in mind, Swifties, rappers and indie darlings! As a historical exercise I took a pass through the canon of the classic rock of my upbringing to find those album covers and albums that remain iconic musically, graphically, and culturally. Like any performative game of picking all-time greats, the conversations and disagreements can be entertaining, around what is essentially an impossible task. So here's to the shameless nostalgia of a late baby boomer dude! Rewind to when we traveled through days and nights of boredom and drama, enacting the elaborate rituals of killing time, the hitchhiking missions and fools errands, the beer runs, the hours cruising in somebody’s mom’s car through endless loops and neighborhoods, random trips to nowhere at all. Was that really us in those dark old photos, smirking behind the long hair and self-conscious affectations? We didn’t know it then but those were the good old days unspooling in real time. Rock on Forever Aspinwall boys! 
THE ALBUMS: What? No Ramones, no Kiss?!? Where's the Foghat, bro? Tell me why my list below is fucked and how you’d fix it... |
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"Listen to Tommy with a candle burning,
"When we're no longer here,
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“Radio's jammed up with Gospel stations
Lost souls callin' long distance salvation
Hey Mr. DJ, won't you hear my last prayer?
Hey ho, rock 'n' roll, deliver me from nowhere...”
— Bruce Springsteen
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"Rock and roll was our rebellion. Our freedom. Our proof we didn’t have to become our parents." — Chrissie Hynde
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“You start out playing rock ’n’ roll so you can have sex and do drugs. But you end up doing drugs so you can still play rock ’n’ roll and have sex.” — Mick Jagger
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"As kids, we didn’t have therapy—we had records."— Billy Joel
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“We ain’t no punk band, we ain’t folk rock, jazz rock, or any of that bullshit. Just rock, and we don’t put any other name on it than that.” — Tom Petty
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“I didn’t choose rock and roll. Rock and roll chose me.”
-- Elvis Presley (attributed)
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