“beautiful_people”

“classic_rock”

Classic Rock My Ass

Rob Archer

Somewhere out there, far away from me on my couch and my TV with the bad picture and the crappy VCR on top of an entertainment center made for all kinds of stuff except what I’ve put on it, Beautiful People are meeting for lunch, going off to hotel rooms, having sex, getting married, buying houses, expanding the tax base.

Breeding.

Making more Beautiful People.

Someone’s got to make them stop.

“david_lee_roth”

Don’t they have some kind of roach motel for Beautiful People? Can’t they make some kind of pheromone that attracts them into a comfy little room with the promise of really good sex with someone named Jody or Buffy (male or female), and then right when they sit on the bed and start undressing, this big blade suddenly slides down from the ceiling, slicing off both legs in one fell swoop, leaving them to bleed to death in a room that’s suddenly locked from the outside and slowly begins shrinking, finally crushing them to death, but only right before the moment they would have died from blood loss anyway, just for maximum suffering?

Then the rest of us could move into their big houses and turn them into crappy little apartment complexes, and cannibalize their Mercedes (is the plural Mercedi?) or whatever the hell they drive now, and use the parts on real cars like Mustangs or Camaros, just like the good old days when John Bonham was still alive and keeping time for the soundtrack of the parking lot filled with high school hormone bags in hot rod Firebirds with stereos blasting In Thru the Out Door or otherwise goofing on “Kashmir,” and Eddie Van Halen and David Lee Roth were still having a beautiful, albeit secretive, homosexual love affair and making beautiful music together, and Ozzy still had the presence of mind not to drop the soon-to-expire Randy Rhoades on his ass when he did that hugging thing on stage shortly after wiping dove blood off his nascently pudgy face, back when 50 to 70% of Saturday Night Live was worth repeating come Monday homeroom.

Nope. Today Beautiful People are continuing, and will continue, to breed. And one day, everyone will be beautiful, and people like me will be extinct. Already the signs are in the air, the comet that killed the dinosaurs will soon strike again, and this time the comet is called Modern Adult Alternative Contemporary Lilith Fairy Fem Pop; hell, they already call my music “classic” rock, and you can just hear the crinkling Ritz cracker wrappers when the crusty old acid-fried DJ says it. I was too late in the ’70s to be a part of the Brady Bunch groove revival the brainless kids are lining up for at the funky run down clubs, and too early for the retro sludge from fat slobs like Sparks, or the Go-Gos, most of whom are gone-gone, selling real estate in Minnesota, or Arizona, or some other place next door to hell. Corey Hart wears his sunglasses at night, yeah right. And his kids are busy walkin’ on the sun.

No, I’m from that fuzzy nether-age, where the great groups were already on their last legs, releasing last or next to last albums; that fuzzy supergroup afterglow right before Keith Moon (or any one of a number of rock supergroup drummers that failed to survive the ’70s by much) drank that last drink and hit the sack.

What the hell. We had a good run anyway. Too bad we couldn’t change the world. I guess we failed.

Then again, that would have made it a nicer place for the Beautiful People to raise children in. So, on second thought, perhaps our failure is our greatest success: We made the world just a little stinkier, just a little rougher, for Buffy and Jody’s spoiled little brats. And hell, if we didn’t give them a radio format they just hate! ◼