The most oft-quoted adage about the Velvet Underground—usually credited to musician/producer Brian Eno—is “the first album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.” Their dark themes, experimental music, sullen imagery, and drug-fueled short life span has made them—in this real world—the ultimate cult band.
But what about a world where Velvet Underground & Nico is not only is a massive critical and commercial success—eventually the biggest selling rock album of all time—but it trounces the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band the same year? And the VU become the most popular and influential band of all time?
Envision a world where our sacred and standard rock history is turned completely upside down. Punk rock fills stadiums instead of dirty clubs. The Rolling Stones break up. Boston and Van Halen are considered radical and fringe artists. Madonna is a Christian revivalist. And GG Allin, the late hardcore punk rock singer one man dynamo who would take a literal shit onstage and eat it, cut himself, and assaults his audience becomes…a mainstream pop icon.
This is the wonderfully twisted music world that journalist/cultural writer Chuck Klosterman creates in Rock*—A Mainstream Alternative History of Alternative Mainstream Music (336 pp., $32.50, Da Capo Press).
Make no mistake: This is a book wholly written by and for music nerds. Klosterman’s rat-a-tat-tat prose freely blends true life bands, names, stories, and concepts to wholly made-up stuff. If in the movies the Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) has a “multiverse” of alternative secret identities and storylines, this is surely one for rock and roll. Otherwise, why would Al Jardine and Mike Love be hailed as the “geniuses” of the Beach Boys while Brian Wilson is just a lazy hack?
And how is Led Zeppelin a “critic’s band” that goes bankrupt while Marc Bolan rides T. Rex to massive global success? One thing that can be agreed on in this universe: KISS was “the thinking man’s rock group” before all four members died in a horrible kiting accident. Yes, kiting accident.
Some of Klosterman’s best passages have him wholly reassessing known, cherished songs. Thus, the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby is “a nostalgic lament about the national decline in UK funeral attendance.” Or Edwin Starr’s “War” about the “potential free market upside for the mortuary industry” (Well, it does have the line “War! It ain’t nothin’ but a heartbreaker/War! Friend only to the undertaker”).
But the biggest tip that this is a fantasy? This is a world where Rock Critics not only have nearly limitless power of influence, but they are also well paid, appreciated, and have their own union in NARC (National Association of Rock Critics). And indispensable.
Klosterman “quotes” Katharine Graham, the late, real-life Washington Post publisher, as saying in the early ‘70s “We can’t risk losing any rock critics right now. If these were just normal people listening to free records and writing about how they sound, it wouldn’t matter that much. But that’s no longer the world in which we live. Yes, Watergate matters. Yes, what’s happening in Cambodia matters. But they don’t matter as much as this new album from Montrose. The guitar dynamics are exceptionally well recorded.”
MTV becomes ROCKSPAN, which intersperses rock videos with high intellectual talk. Thus, videos by Dexy’s Midnight Runners, Culture Club, or Iron Maiden are chopped up by long convos from William F. Buckley on invading Grenada or debates between Camille Paglia and Susan Sontag.
Klosterman’s inventiveness blending fact and fiction means there’s something wonderfully offbeat on nearly every page: Lenny Kravitz is dubbed The Perfect Rock Star by NARC, who also successfully lobby George Lucas to make Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” play over the end credits for his Star Wars movie.
And those beloved Beatles—who never really broke up—are reduced to playing county fairs and gentlemen’s clubs. Oh, and they’ve added both Yoko Ono and Linda McCartney on as permanent members.
Chuck Klosterman is one of our foremost (and wry) critics and chroniclers of social, music, and art culture. Part literalist and part wild fantasist, his voice is also uniquely his own—and not in the “look at me” way of Lester Bangs.
Rock* ends its narrative in 2002 before streaming, Spotify, and smartphones. But that still leaves nearly a quarter century of rock “history” up for grabs. Is it too early for a companion novella?
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