HBO's Sunday night premiere of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert felt like a farewell party. No amount of Botox and hair dye could disguise the fact that rock 'n' roll's most talented practitioners are a dying breed.
It was hard to watch the four-hour-plus concert (originally staged on October 29 and 30 at New York's Madison Square Garden) without realizing that many of the rock deities onstage — Jerry Lee Lewis, Simon & Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Mick Jagger, Lou Reed — will most likely be gone within the next ten years, or at least gone from the stage.
Which band most deserves to be in Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2010?
Rock is in uncharted waters. The 1950s music of rebellion is now the subject of Ivy League college courses. Rock artifacts fill a museum in Cleveland, and some would argue that the music has now lost its bite and is now no more than a glorified oldies jukebox playing in one of those fake '50s diners.
But watching last night's HBO broadcast, it was hard to be a cynic. It was also hard not to feel wistful. The evidence of rock's enduring power and its removal from cultural center stage was infused in every frame of the concert film. Some of the most striking images from the show included:
- Jerry Lee Lewis' "Great Balls of Fire" seeming like a quaint parlor tune instead of the fiery '50s rock anthem that seduced kids and scared their parents.
- Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel singing the "The Sounds of Silence": two men approaching 70 years old who sound as if they discovered singing with together for the first time.
- The quiet, confident cool of Jeff Beck reinterpreting the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" with his Fender Strat.
- The genius, odd pairing of the Kinks' Ray Davies schooling Metallica on guitar riffage with "All Day and All of the Night."
And on and on and on. Brilliant rock craftsman after genius rock architect all saying their long good-bye, all passing the torch from one old hand to another. The youngest guy onstage was 34-year-old Will.i.am — a gifted musician but hardly a rock 'n' roller. There's no one to keep the dream alive, so everyone came to "Rock's Greatest Cathedral," as Bono put it, to pay their last respects.
The dream is over, just as John Lennon predicted. The problem is not the oft-repeated curmudgeonly line that "No one makes any good music anymore." There's plenty of good music. In fact, there's more music than ever.
The problem is that no one cares about rock 'n' roll anymore. There's too much of it to care about. It's been reduced to a Google search and a MP3 file on a computer. Rock is like wine. It needs to breathe and age to realize its full power. How can everything mean something to us? How can everything matter? When there is too much of something, it all ends up meaning nothing. There's too much music with only a small part of it being rock 'n' roll.
Rock used to stand center stage and command the cultural conversation. Now it's a museum piece — or one of a million nameless tracks in the rock section of the iTunes store. Either way, it's gone, which makes the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as important as the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. We must preserve our past in order to remember it — to prove we existed.
There was a moment in our history when rock 'n' roll existed. It was musical empire born of the spirit that paid its allegiance only to rebellion. It's one of the best things America ever did for the world. All empires fall, but none go down with as joyful a noise as rock 'n' roll.
Follow Shawn Amos on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GetBack
Loading comments… 
But I agree with Amos. There was something about this show that felt like a farewell, Maybe not literally, as there will be more like this. But this was the first show where most of the participan
But the energy was not the same as when most of these same stars got together and did those Kerry concerts which had a lot of the same type of collaborat
And then you had the sight of Paul Simon who is learning to age gracefully
Doesn't matter. This was great stuff.
And, people are still making great music: people we have not heard of, as well as people we know. There is Guster, and Aimee Mann and there is Ben Folds to pick up where Billy Joel left off. And Nellie McKay is all over the place.
The music business is the music business and can be as frustratin
And, by the way, before you mourn the end of rock and roll you better listen to Eilen Jewell or the Shins or the Weepies or the Kennedys.
Ah, stop whining and mourning the past. Those were great days, and the music we grew up will live forever, but you need to stop playing your old records all the time and open your ears before you try to tell me that it is over.
Rock giants may be a thing of the past, but there is plenty of good music being made.
Long live rock!