36. So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star

By Don

So you want to be a rock and roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time and learn how to play

Roger McQuinn and Chris Hillman wrote these lyrics in around 1966. You know Roger McQuinn and Chris Hillman, as in The Byrds.

Now the key phrase in this song is “take some time and learn how to play”. The point being that if you want to be a rock and roll star you should know how to play an instrument, even if that intrument is your voice. Now why am I telling you all this? Well we will get back to it.

We were quite lucky in our timing to visit Bucharest, as on the weekend we were there they celebrated Bucuresti Days which is to say they celebrated their city. Lots of activities of which many were focused on the street in front of the place we were staying which was a long boulevard that ran from a large array of fountains at one end to the Palace of the Parliament at the other. In front of the Palace a large stage had been set up and for two days they had been doing sound checks that reverberated all the way down to our apartment, which was a km away. Big stuff coming.

We had been told that there would be a concert on Friday, then Saturday late afternoon and finally on Saturday evening. I think we walked down a total of 3 times trying to see if a concert was happening to find nothing. But finally we hit pay dirt on the 4 attempt on Saturday evening. Of note is that on the Saturday all the way up and down the boulevard there were buskers, bands, food stands and thousands of locals milling about so it wasn’t any hardship.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

When the concert finally began there was a warm up band that played mostly crooner type music. They played it very well (interestingly not a Romanian band, the singer sounded American). Then the big event which was a band, and I use the term ‘band’ in the loosest of sense, called Schiller. Now Schiller plays Electronica, and like ‘band’ we are using ‘plays’ also in the loosest way. I’m not an Electronica fan but, well it was free. And so…

Well the set up. Massive stage, huge array of speakers so that people circling in the space station could hear, big screens to allow for full visual effects, and did I mention security like you were going to see the Pope? Anyway on either side of the stage they had big screens so that you would see close ups of the ‘musicians’ while they ‘played’.

In the end it was definitely a spectacle. The visual effects were quite stunning. The sound was full, the beat rhythmic and trance inducing. The young audience seemed to be really enjoying it.

A bit more of the set up. Schiller consists of three people with 4 or 5 keyboard synthesizers and a few computer screens. No drums, no other instruments. Because of the close ups shown on the side screens you could see what these ‘musicians’ were actually doing. And it was close to nothing that resembled playing an instrument. The drumming was all loops, the music was all loops, and the melody, when there was one, would be very simple played with one hand, but mostly they would just touch one key and then play with dials with the other hand. Computers did almost all of it. For much of a ‘song’ two of the members wouldn’t barely touch a keyboard, just changing a base note of a chord every minute or so. There didn’t seem to be any correlation between what you were hearing and what they were doing. The young people liked it all the same. Have I become my dad?

In 1963 Bob Dylan wrote:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

I suspect Dylan wasn’t thinking about an age where musicians are actually just technicians. Not to say that to develop the visual effects and master the technology that generates full rhythmic sound without actually playing anything isn’t creative or taking skill. But are they rock and roll stars? I guess I shouldn’t criticize what I clearly don’t understand.

But I was entertained. And later they lit up the Palace with lasers, shifting colours and giving it a surreal feeling.