State Fair Rock

This guy is a little hard on Foreigner, and he does elevate KISS to the stature of Led Zeppelin, but his underlying points are valid.


70s rockers reduced to playing state fairs
By JOHN WENZ
August 30, 2005
So, Foreigner is playing at the State Fair tonight for the low price of “free.”
This is the kind of “free,” though, that requires tickets to the fair, which cost a little bit more than free.
It’s not the Edgar Winter “Free Ride,” which was sort of free, unless you bought the album.
This all harkens to a conversation over some tacos.
Sunday night, I and two of the reporters in our fine section sat in a local bar, eating tacos and listening to tepid classic rock.
A few songs in, someone reflected that classic rock radio is one of the worst things to happen to music.
It’s not necessarily the music itself that is bad. After all, it’s probably the only place to go to get your fill of Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and some of the other greats of the era.
But for every Zeppelin, there are 10 dupes who don’t reach even the bottom tier of Page and Plant’s output.
These artists, in turn, get played twice per hour during the so-called “rock blocks.”
And with the increasing homogenization of radio thanks to media conglomeration, these artists are now getting played twice per hour on rock blocks nationwide.
Because they get played twice an hour every hour in every corner of our country, the bands are able to find a striking relevance with their fans, and though they may not fill arenas, the bands still are able to drive in the beer-swilling old guard who just want to rock ’n roll all night and party every day.
I would be hard-pressed to call Foreigner influential. I can name exactly one person who swore eternally by Foreigner: Mr. Z, my high school theology teacher (this is the part where I reveal my Catholic school background).
But I can’t name a single band that has ever name-checked Foreigner, or even covered a Foreigner song. “A String Band Tribute to Foreigner” is nowhere to be found in any Wal-Mart or FYE CD rack, and “Hot Blooded” is now hardly anything more than a relic of a bygone era.
Foreigner would seem to live in their little cultural bubble, a bubble populated almost exclusively by their contemporaries and bar cover bands. They are neither as ruthlessly incompetent as Bachmann-Turner Overdrive nor as refined in their cheesiness as Journey.
They are their own entity in their anonymously bland way. “Cold as Ice,” “Double Vision” and “Juke Box Hero” are hardly “classic” in the same sense as KISS, Zeppelin or Sabbath. But they are distinctly Foreigner: calculating, homogenous and soulless yet propulsive, hard and driving.
They are the quintessential band for hard rock monkeys like any character in “Dazed and Confused.” They play rock, or did until “I Want to Know What Love Is.” But they do so in a way that requires virtually no reflection, and in a non-confrontational way that unites the legion of rock fans.
Mick Jones and his cronies are relegated to K-Tel compilations and fading memories of such glory. Our current musical landscape is producing the next Foreigners, distinctive yet bland.
They are living the “now playing state fairs” clichés live and in living color.
In some ways, it’s curiously sublime. In our generation, they are relegated to a sort of pun, an irony of the bygone era. And to the fans that were there, they are nostalgia, the reliving of times past.
In some way, they continue to live in that same mid-level bubble of 1970s hard rock, doomed to the same fate as their contemporaries. But it’s a bubble that will never truly pop until Mick Jones and his crew are too old to rock.
It’s better to burn out than fade away, according to Neil Young. But how does it apply to the bands that never burnt out and never faded away, but instead were, in some ways, always there?