Where were you when Brad Delp died? What were you doing, and what did you do with the rest of your day? That's sort of the way Lester Bangs begins his "Where Were You When Elvis Died." Finding out Elvis had died, Bangs said, was "like someone just came up and told me there aren't going to be any more cheeseburgers in the world."

Brad Delp was the lead singer of the rock band Boston. You may not know the members of Boston, but if you've been an American citizen for the past 30 years, you've heard a Boston song. I don't think we should mourn his passing with as much pomp and tears as Elvis'. I am not saying I am a huge fan of Boston, either. Nor am I someone who seeks out hearing Boston on the radio, which, up here in the Albany or Capital Region radio market, with its 3-4 classic rock stations, isn't hard to do.

I do know that when I do hear a Boston song--the beginning of a Boston song--and the time is right, and the station is coming in crisp and clean on a long haul in the car, I crank it up. These are songs that are in my DNA, and I rebelled against them at first. Boston songs, like ZZ Top, Rush, the list goes on, were so all over the radio growing up in South Jersey, and the bands I was getting interested in -- REM, Midnight Oil, Husker Du, The Replacements -- never, ever got on the radio. People forget this, I think, and at the risk of sounding like those walking-to-school-uphill-both-ways kinda old guys, many of us who sought out different music, even my sort of entry-level alternative tastes, kept the torch aflame for rock music that was moving forward, as opposed to good-time anthem rock.

But the passing of someone like Delp calls for anyone who has ever played air guitar to just take a minute, and think about Boston. Right now, as I write this, idiots are media jamming the Wikipedia entry for Delp, sticking in all kinds of "Boston sucks!" punchline stuff and erroneous factoids, all in pure punk rocker fashion. Here's a PDF of the entry, which I hope will be cleaned up, and an excerpt:

That day, the official Web site for the band was taken down and replaced with the statement: "We've just lost the suckiest singer ever." He was scheduled to perform with Beatlejuice in Somerville, Massachusetts, on the day he died. Beatlejuice has canceled its upcoming shows in the wake of Delp's death, which they were going to do anyway because he sucked so fuckin' bad.

It still amazes me that folks who did this sort of online tagging, who presumably didn't even grow up during the Dark Ages of Alternative Rock, felt the need to heckle a dead dude's Wikipedia entry. This is not counterculture; it's the same dogmatic, class rock-rules crap we first- and second-generation punkers went up against and fought against happening, except in reverse. I'm not that worked up about as much as the privileging of perceived influence over fame.

What has happened over a couple of decades, I've learned, is that one generation's corporate rock becomes the next generation's fake book singalongs. I've sung Boston's "Piece of Mind" at at least two hootenannies in the past 10 years. One generation's embarrassment becomes the next's guilty pleasure (cf. Sonic Youth et al. doing Carpenters' songs), which in turn becomes composer's fodder (cf. Bartok's appropriation of Hungarian folk songs). The Brad Delp Variations will happen in the next 100 years, and I think in the week following his death we might want to think about that.

The "corporate rock still sucks" crowd still misses the point. Without Boston's "More Than A Feeling" there'd be no Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." It's the same exact lick, the same chord box, the same quiet-loud quiet-loud formula. The difference? A hip quotient, to be sure; just one look at the bearded Delp, who died last week at 55 (here's the obituary from MTV News, posted only 4 hours ago, a full 4 days after his death); then again, beards are back, and he could pass for the drummer in The Killers.

I was never sure about this idea of corporate or test group rock, a common complaint hurled at bands like Boston, Styx, REO Speedwagon, and even my faves, Queen. Compared to today's hi-tech niche-viral-multimedia marketing, the fact that Boston's first album sold 30 million copies and went platinum has to have more to do with Boston's songs being catchy and anthemic and connection-making. Was music ever not marketed? Delp's tenor sounding like Roy Orbison-meets-Johnny Mathis than it being completely pre-packaged. The difference between Boston and Nirvana, besides facial hair, is that Boston positioned itself or was positioned as a fun-time band, and Kurt Cobain set out to be a capital-R capital-S Rock Star. Both claim the same careerist ambitions. I think Cobain and his ilk got that there wasn't much of a difference. Just read Cobain's journals. Just watch their tour bus favorite, the documentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Then fast forward a couple of years and listen to Sleater Kinney's version of "More Than A Feeling."

It's a false choice, or course, this Brad-or-Kurt choice. But the point is that when someone whose voice has been with you for so long goes away, finding out you won't be able to hear that voice, that you will never be able to hear "Piece of Mind" or "Long Time" sung by the original singer some summer outdoor concert is, well, like finding out there won't be anymore cheeseburgers. And that deserves at least a moment of silence.

Labels: rants, Riffs