It’s been a long week. I can always tell it’s been a long week when I continually forget what day it is. Something about our new “weather” makes it ever more difficult to distinguish one day from another – was it Tuesday when it rained? It rained every day, but was it in the morning or the afternoon? The rain seems to separate mornings from evenings as though they were separate entities and I feel myself believing three days have passed in the span of just one.
I bring this up not only as a pseudo-poetic introduction to some shameless self-promotion, but also as an introduction to an examination of the necessity of rock in roll in our lives. It’s something that we in Saint Bernadette think about often and something that has been in the news over the past few weeks as public radio and VH1 (things we tune into now that we are officially irrelevant people) feature profiles of Woodstock on its 40th anniversary. Is rock n roll important? Is it necessary?
In the interest of community building as well as shameless self-promotion, I would offer that it is both. As critics and pundits and commentators struggle with reconciling their admiration for the music that made up Woodstock and the fact that it was really just an overcrowded disaster full of drug and alcohol users, one thing they often forget to mention is that the music works without the drug and alcohol. 11 year olds in the 70s put on The Who in their bedroom to great effect just like I danced around to The Police when I was 8 and totally convinced that “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” was about me.
Rock is the expression of that little voice inside that’s always demanding this: “Tell me again why we created this bizarre system of life whereby I need to go somewhere for 8 hours a day that I do not like and do something that I do not care about, all for the privilege of coming home to someone I probably can’t stand and affording to spend the weekend buying things I do not want or really need or that perhaps I pretend to really want or need so that I don’t have to face the fact that I spend most of my life doing what I don’t want to do?”
it could be then, that rock is just a part of the man’s game, a false panacea, that keeps us trapped in our cycles of false achievements and phony happiness. Or it could be that, if used correctly, it’s the motivation necessary to respond to that demand with “You don’t need to spend most of your life doing what you don’t want to do. Just some of it. Now, figure out what you really want to do. And do it. Really hard.”
I can’t promise life changing epiphanies at our show this Friday, but I can promise that we will try – really hard.
Saint Bernadette performs this Friday with
Joe Roberto and Poverty Hash
Friday, August 28th
Acoustic Cafe
2926 Fairfield Ave.
Bridgeport, CT
10 pm
$5
