The History of Music: A Personal Story (Part 3)

Punk is Dead

Elton was pale and unshaven, his face brought to mind a young Ewan McGregor, while his demeanor--slouched, introspective, with a wardrobe in constant mourning--brought to mind a beatnik poet.  He played guitar in our high school jazz band when really the instrument that most suited him was piano.  Unlike your typical attention whore guitar player, Elton always played his guitar sitting down and hidden away somewhere in the rhythm section, his head leaning into the neck as if the electric guitar were whispering a secret to him.  The only indications the audience had of his existence were the occasional of off-beat high-note chords that would slide deliciously back up the fret board.  When he would take a solo, the impressionable audience would look at each other and say, “I didn’t know there was a guitar.  He’s good.”

Elton became my guitar teacher early on, after I decided to follow in my brother’s footsteps and join the jazz band. (My brother played the drums.) He was quiet, dedicated, patient and sharp; he only spoke when absolutely necessary, but in those moments he was clever and devastatingly ironic.  He could also be condescending and elitist.  He quickly became my reluctant mentor.

Elton ridiculed my taste in music.  Punk in its earliest forms had been the last stop on the long road of making music a popular art form; you didn’t need to know how to play an instrument all that well, and you didn’t even need to be a decent singer, to express yourself through punk music.  It was the ultimate form of rebellion against the traditional oligarchy of music.  But you can only rebel for so long.  After twenty years, punk music had became a cheap imitation of itself.  The simplistic four-note bar-chord progressions, were no longer a symbol of rebellion, but of conformity to an established niche.  “Corny, preachy, repetitive, and unoriginal,” was Elton’s crushing assessment.

He led me down the path of sustained and minor chords, of bizarre instruments and strange computer noises: he introduced me to the almighty Radiohead.