INFINITY GUITARS

The poet laureate of Detroit, Michigan, Robert Seger, once proclaimed, “So you’re a little bit older and a lot less bolder than you used to be/So you used to shake ’em down, but now you stop and think about your dignity.” Fifty years later, for those of us at CREEM, the first three of those accusations apply. If the reader feels as though the whole “dignity” thing should be a consideration, it’s worth noting that Seger was commenting on rockers (and rock ’n’ roll in general) looking a bit ragged around the eyes in 1976, when rock ’n’ roll was barely old enough to legally buy beer. Back then, the only time “classic” and “rock” were used in conjunction was when one of those mid’70s weirdos, some of whom were starting to get re-hipped to the joys of short songs and shorter hair, reaffirmed their commitment to rolling over 18th-century composers of classical music. Back in the 20th century, it would be another few years before “classic rock” entered the vernacular. Whether Bob Seger had any of that in mind when he wrote “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” is hard to say. The song was at an exact midpoint between Seger being the first person to apply basic arithmetic (“2 + 2 = ?”) to the Vietnam War and, with “Her Strut,” recording a very sexy song about Jane Fonda. So it’s not like the guy was unaware of the forces of history.

What were we talking about again? Oh right, “dignity.” A nice gig, if you can get it. But maybe not essential when considering rock ’n’ roll or, in the case of this issue, classic rock. The least forgetful of all the rocks. The rock whose adherence to memory is so elephantine that it never leaves the room. Classic rock, which was initially supposed to be a marketing term for radio stations that didn’t want to play disco, now encompasses nearly all the guitar rock made between 1962 and, roughly, now. On one level, this makes some sort of intuitive sense. We can’t be the first people to notice how much Kurt Cobain sounds like Bob Seger, how obvious it is that Linda Ronstadt would’ve taken Waxahatchee on tour in a heartbeat, or how spiritually compatible Creedence Clearwater and Sleater-Kinney are. At the very least we can all agree that the line between Led Zeppelin and Soundgarden is shorter than the short gray hairs we increasingly pull from our shower drain.