Austin City Limits Festival in Aught-Eight. | The Real Guitar Heroes

Austin City Limits Festival this year came in a concentrated dose from Friday evening through Saturday night. For me it was the return of the Drive By Truckers. I used to see them every time they came through town. One year I saw them 8 times in a week. My friends and I committed to the task starting in Dallas and tracked them through Denton, Austin, and back down to San Marcos. It earned us an invite back to the house where they were staying. Wildly drunk, I couldn’t keep up and my girlfriend drove me home. After that I could usually get in a quick conversation with Jason, the band’s youngest member and now that he’s left and I let two albums worth of tours go by I’m back to anonymous fan status. And that’s still a good place to be with the Truckers because you’re in good company. Their latest album Brighter than Creation’s Dark is especially raw and to the point. No pretense with these guys. Looking around at Emos I realized I was surrounded by sweaty men who knew all the words and were frequently singing along with arms around shoulders. DBT’s songwriters speak honestly about suburban living, the pain of war, and what grabbed me is a quick line at the end of the song Self Destructive Zones that I felt struck at the core of what’s happening with kids and music today.

The verse goes:

The hippies rode a wave putting smiles on faces,
that the devil wouldn’t even put a shoe
Caught between a generation dying from its habits,
and another thinking rock and roll was new
Till the pawn shops were packed like a backstage party,
hanging full of pointy ugly cheap guitars
And the young'uns all turned to karaoke,
hanging all their wishes upon disregarded stars

It’s that last bit about karaoke that makes me laugh then shudder. I read karaoke as ‘Guitar Hero’. Kids are using video games to mainline fame directly into their veins. You get to skip practicing, skip writing your own songs, skip the pain, and just crawl in the skin of Slash. Nintendo knows it too. The commercial for Rock Band shows a mob of hip teenagers invading a suburban home as if it were one of rock’s hallowed venues. Mom’s probably heating up pizza pockets in the living room. They flow downstairs into the basement where there’s a full stage, lights, mics, guitars, instruments, and probably a load of laundry running in the back.

I was guilty of a similar fantasy when I was a teenager. Instead of video games, it was pure imagination. I wrote an ongoing story of an alternate future where all my friends had a band. We practiced in the back room at my parent’s house. We performed at the fine arts camp in Michigan I went to. Then I caught up with my age in the story, which was the last year of high school and it occurred to me that if I had spent less time writing and more time practicing with my friends we might actually have a band. It took years to get used to the idea that I could just go out and play my own material in front of people if I wanted to. I never did form a band.

Without digressing too much I think Guitar Hero will be the drug of choice for teenagers who have the dream but don’t see why they should have to pay dues when they can go directly to rock star status within a video game. This is not an apocalyptic problem. What will happen is those same kids will realize that heroin is not nearly as rewarding as living in the real world, including the sacrifices you have to make to live in it. Maybe they will become so pent up from funneling their creativity through a plastic 4 buttoned guitar that the aftermath will be the most moving, inspired rock music we’ve heard in generations.

ACL always proves that good music is still happening, and it’s not all that underground. It’s just not on the radio. You can trust teenagers to root it out, too. They have nothing but time on their hands to plumb the internet and social networking for quality, or at least original manifestations of Great Music.