Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life Read Online Free

innuendo of “Big Balls,” in which Bon Scott observes that some balls are held for “charity” and others for “fancy dress.”
    But when they’re held for pleasure
They’re the balls that I like best
    Bon Scott delivered these lines with a smirking pomposity that struck us as unbearably sophisticated. The man was Byron. In the meatiest passages of particular songs, we closed our eyes and let the chords surge through us. It was a kind of trance. We were alone, but not alone. We were embarrassed—everything embarrassed us in seventh grade—but flushed with angry hopes.
    When people bitch about the death of the vinyl LP as a medium (and lord knows they bitch) what they’re mostly lamenting is the death of this kind of listening. Music as a concerted sonic experience, rather than the backing track to a flashing screen. What I’m suggesting hereis that Drooling Fanaticism boils down to undivided attention, which is not only our most endangered human resource but the first and final act of love.
    Interlude:
Paradise Theater
, American Classic
    I mentioned Styx. Having done so, I cannot unmention them.
    Let me say, then, that I loved Styx and that I still love Styx and not ironically either. There is no sin in the realm of taste. This will come as a shock to a critical establishment that prides itself on haughty judgment. But you can’t tell someone his or her ears are wrong. You can’t rescind the pleasure they derive from a particular piece of music. You can certainly deride that pleasure. If we were to meet and you were to break into the refrain of “Renegade,” for instance, or “Come Sail Away,” I would feel embarrassed. I might even, for the sake of camaraderie, go along with the gag.
Ha-ha-ha. Yeah, Styx: what was I thinking?
But that is quite different from what my body experiences when I listen to Styx. And in particular, when I listen to what I will now call—with no alcoholic intervention—the Styx masterpiece,
Paradise Theater
.
    PT
was released in the winter of 1981, my freshman year in high school. It documents the demise of Chicago’s Paradise Theater, which is a
metaphor
for the demise of America’s civic culture, which is
deep
, man. So it’s a concept album, or half a concept album, because only Dennis DeYoung was committed to the concept and he was the pianist. The rest of the band almost certainly thought DeYoung was a fag.
    That I memorized the album, word for word, will go without saying. That I used impromptu recitations to score titty privileges at Jewish summer camp also can be assumed. I was especially taken by the rousing power ballad “The Best of Times.” I loved everything about it:the Elton Johnish piano intro, DeYoung’s histrionic vibrato, his shameless appropriation of Dickens, the marching cadence, the chorus with its richly harmonized coda (“These are the best … of
times”)
, Tommy Shaw’s Harrisonesque solo—a solo I cannot hear without picturing Shaw in the bright green jumpsuit he wore for the concert video: the Jolly Green Giant’s tiny catamite lover. I dug every song on
PT
. The pulsing anthems (“Too Much Time on My Hands”), the weepers (“She Cares”), the obligatory coke addiction song (“Snowblind”), even DeYoung’s corny piano outro. I bought the whole enchilada.
    America
was
in decline, at least my version of America, and Styx got that. It chewed certain big ideas—dying cities, suburban atomization, a lost and shining past—into bite-size bromides, then set them to melodies that fell somewhere between the Monkees and Foreigner. It might be said that they lamented the homogenization of American culture while, in fact, homogenizing American culture. Or it might be said (if you were me) that they nailed the prevailing zeitgeist, the fraudulent nostalgia and grandiose self-regard of the Reagan era, the synthesized stunts and fluorescent, shoulder-padded duds. They made the listener feel good about everything, including the things one should