I finally am going to bring my stretched-out (16-month!) “series” on Winger and theology to a conclusion with this post. For those keeping score at home, part one is here, which hiccuped into part one and a half, and here is part two, followed by three, then comes four, only to give way to five, and here we are presently at six.

In case you lost track, this series has come to the point of thinking out loud about how bodies in the rock culture of Winger open up matters of theological interest, and how theology finds things interesting in these hard rock embodiments. To quote myself (with permission) from my last post on this topic: “One of the theologically significant ways of rock culture is training in bodily habitation. As religion scholar Talal Asad among many others have argued, the training of sense was intrinsic to the working of classic Catholic sacramental theology and is part of what Christianity and Islam share. With regard to how rock does it, I have called this the performance of a bodily wherewithal, wherein instruments like electric guitars or basses become something like natural appendages for the musician, in a way that speaks to fans (including other musicians) of bodily integration and excellence or deep congruence in inhabiting the world.”

In part five, I was discussing lead singer/bassist Kip Winger as “trainer of sense” and object of imitative desire on the part of fans. His ballet training and classical music interests were mentioned, and I took those to signal an uncommon interest on Kip Winger’s part in refined bodily presentation in musical performance.

Steve Almond’s recent book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (Random House, 2010), has some fun with this aspect of Winger’s persona. In fact, Almond’s book is the only work in print that I know of that dedicates a special section to a Winger roast of sorts. That (very brief) part is promisingly titled “Interlude: The Kip Winger Canon” (pp. 144-147).

Almond, in a section definitely not suitable for kids, talks with his wife Erin about Kip Winger’s unique power of bodily symbolizing the rock aesthetic, in the context of a real or imagined (and leading to further-imagined) encounter(s) that Erin may or may not have had with Kip Winger. While the actual narrative here may not be more than a forgettable snicker for the Winger in-crowd…

(NOTE: for what it’s worth (and I aim to write a review of the book eventually at R&T), I found the whole discussion too clever by half, and similar to Howard Hampton’s recent review, wanted more from Almond. A discussion of Winger that tried harder wouldn’t have to be boring, un-arch, or lacking cultural insight, if that is what Almond was worried about. (Of course, smart writing about pop music always risks uncoolness, and cleverness will never fully patch that constitutive leak.))

…it does help me transition to the point I want to make in this post: that whatever one might laud about what Kip Winger’s rock persona, it sometimes manifests within the old masculine/heterosexual codes that dance with patriarchalism — one of rock’s oldest and tiredest songs.

Where are female bodies in this real-symbolic metal world?

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Twenty-five years ago, in the middle of my teenage years, I went to a poundingly loud concert in Kansas City, Missouri, featuring lasers, smoke, explosions, and some of the best musicianship that contemporary rock had to offer. Last night, at Jones Beach on Long Island just outside New York City, I had that Kansas City concert in mind as, a quarter-century later, I was attending another concert by the same band, Rush, now as someone entering what is often called “mid-life.”

I have seen this band at least a dozen times, and having discovered their music around age 11, have been listening intently for 30 years now. They are an acquired taste, and often hated by critics, but last night I was feeling more than a little vindicated in sticking with them. Having won major industry awards for bass, guitar, and drums; having received multiple top awards in Canada (their home country) for performance and songwriting; having been the musical inspiration for a recent Hollywood movie and new video games; having been embraced by the Colbert Report, Rolling Stone magazine, and given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; having been the subject of an award-winning documentary; and having more consecutive gold and platinum albums than any band but the Rolling Stones and the Beatles…. This band has never stopped pushing forward. Few bands last this long, and do so with such vibrancy and continually deepened skill into the later stages of their career. Even though two band members are 56, and one is 57, they are currently preparing a new album for release next summer. They remind us that we are still inventing what the rock life can be.

Herein lies one interesting part of the show last night. Jones Beach, like many dates on their current tour, was sold out, and the fact that these rock legends are pushing 60 does not seem to matter to these fans. When seen against the backdrop of the expense of modern concerts and overall decline in the concertgoing business, the fact that Rush is still able to sell out 5,000-10,000 (and in Brazil, 50,000-60,000) seat venues consistently, after nearly forty years as a band, as well as make albums that continue to go gold and platinum, suggests to me that more than fan nostalgia is going on.

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I recently wrote about the ways that rock musicians model desire and its satisfaction, using the example of Reb Beach, lead guitarist of Winger, and the way he relates to the guitar as part of his body, as an integrated embodiment of the song, during live shows.

I have not yet mentioned how vocal chatter can comment on the bodily wherewithal during live shows. What a musician says during performance can interpret, supplement, sometimes replace, their larger bodily wherewithal.

And so it was fun to notice, at the Winger show in New York City recently, that Reb Beach mouthed a bit of a mock-parroting of lead singer Kip Winger’s opening line to the song “Madalaine,” a lyric that, devoid of irony, declares, “Tell you ’bout this lady!” As Kip Winger sang that line, Beach lip-synched it with just enough of a “Can you believe he is singing that?” smile to give the audience an interstice of irony in which to firmly plant one rock-stomping foot, as Beach himself was doing, while still enjoying a song like “Madalaine,” which includes keening lyrics like: “This is love too tough to tame,” “Beware of the girl! Beware of the pain”!

The creation of an escape-space in Beach’s silent vocality helped model how desire can work in rock: taste and see how good this sounds and feels to be hearing this loud, driving, melodic, musicianly music together.

To the degree that music is a conduit of salvation, and by salvation I mean, in a nutshell, the growing of a deep yes to reality, in, through, and beyond this world, then we have to learn how to feel that world in which we live, and these clues from musicians are part of the cues we get. We have to learn how to “be saved”; we have to learn how to be in and with our music.

To be continued (next up: Kip Winger)…

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

This post furthers my recent sketches relating theology to Winger (Part One is here, One and a Half here, and Two is here).

One of the most recognizable images of Winger’s live shows — which they share with larger rock culture — is the utter importance of the musicians’ bodily wherewithal to the sound, look, and feel of the rock experience. Last weekend, I saw Winger at BB King’s in New York City,

and before the show, I was talking with other fans gathered in front of the stage. One woman said to me that she was trying to get as close as possible to lead guitarist Reb Beach’s side of the stage because, as she put it, Beach “totally melds with his guitar,” he is “so into it, like he’s in a trance.” I could not disagree, and kept her observation with me through the performance and my later reflection on the band.

Beach is among a coterie of lead guitarists who display an uncanny familiar and lavish sympathy with their guitar, making it into a same and separate entity at once: both dance partner and electric extension of Beach’s own body. For those whose tastes run to rock, it is compelling to be in the presence of this style of musicianship. I think the fan who said that to me is pointing to the way that bodily wherewithals or dispositions among rock musicians can symbolize and refocus fans’ desires. I have felt the same way in seeing the relationship of Geddy Lee to his bass guitar, Michelle Malone to her guitar, and many fans say something similar of Hendrix’s relationship to his guitar. Rock musicians, and probably all musicians, can develop intimate relationships with their instruments, and this in itself is spiritually interesting and important, but it takes another kind of psychology and musical identity to allow the abandon tucked into that intimate relationship to show itself in that peculiar combination of a studied and unstudied showing so characteristic of rock, especially hard rock, shows. There is also something interesting here in the way that this musical surrender allows body postures for men in particular that are forsworn in larger society. In the logic of “normal” North American everyday life, these postures would be weird or, importantly, “queer,” but here the queer becomes revelatory, a “total meld.” Whatever this is speaking to in fans’ desires, it seems to be related to some kind of freedom that is an excellence, a relationship to a beyond, and the beauty of a sacred singularity.

Here is a clip of the band from last weekend’s NYC show. Beach is the guitarist with the very long hair on the right side of the screen. In addition to lead guitar, you can see he also takes a harmonica solo!

And another show I attended in Los Angeles in 2007 had Beach channeling this guitar solo:

To be continued…

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Do you know what riggers do for rock? I just watched an engrossing documentary that anyone who enjoys learning more about rock culture will savor. I apologize in advance for yet another post that references Rush, but this topic goes beyond my well-rehearsed unironic ironic deironizing of one great Canadian band. I want to talk a little about roadies, about road professionals on rock tours.

The documentary is titled Backstage Secrets, and is more a 5-part television-type documentary than a full film, but those five parts are fascinating. When I used to pore over rock tour books, and in the days when the album credits were part of the art to be absorbed along with listening to the 33-rpm inside, I noticed that bands used to thank so-and-so for “rigging.” I figured it had something to do with pulling ropes. But from Backstage Secrets, I learned that it has to do with hanging chains from the ceiling of arenas! Setting the “points” from ceiling to floor is one task of the advance crew for a rock show, wherein they must correlate the hardware that they need to “fly” (raise off the floor) with the potential places to hang it up on the ceiling of the arena (or outdoor “shed”). The throngs of speakers have to fly, as do the video screens, as do the lights. And that all has to be set first thing on the morning of the show (or the day before, if schedules allow), so the audio, light, and video professionals can get their hundreds of pieces off the truck and assembled and flown, and the instrument techs who handle the well-being of the individual instruments (for Rush, this means guitar, bass, keyboards, drums) can get their stuff set up, and it is all overseen by a tour manager. I have been a rock fan for 30 years, but had only the faintest idea of all this.

A handful of times, I have snuck into Rush soundchecks. The first time was probably Kemper Arena in Kansas City, when I showed up around 2:00, walked around the arena for an hour, and then walked in with the beer man through a side door around 3:00 and sat there until the soundcheck started a little after 4:00. Seeing a major band in the informal setting of a soundcheck, playing intently but without flash, checking out sounds and settings, each in their own preoccupied headspace, hearing them talk to their techs, I loved seeing that part of the rock world. It gave me the briefest taste of how much pre-production goes into making an evening of rock go off so enjoyably. My last time was probably the Fleet Center (formerly Boston Garden) in Boston about seven or eight years ago. I walked around to the back of the arena through an open gate, and to the backstage door. There were the tour buses, there was (drummer) Neil Peart’s motorcycle trailer. I walked in and found my way to the arena and sat down. The sound of loud static came out of the speakers as the audio checks were underway, and the lights were flash-glittering all wondrous-like, then there was a pause, and then the band came out and started the soundcheck. I probably did this five or six times total. Each time, I was eventually escorted out by security. And I have noticed that in the past decade, pre-concert outdoor security at arenas has definitely ramped up. I doubt I could get in now, and now there are so many fans who are trying to do so that it is almost impossible. When I first tried around 1988, I was one of just a few fans hanging out around Kemper Arena, and the others were by the backstage door hoping for autographs. The pre-concert fan scene has grown more intense since then, probably for better and for worse. Any primer I could have once written on getting into soundchecks would now be mostly obsolete — although still fun to write.

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On the heels of Mary and Mike’s recent ruminations on her rock addiction and his inquiry into defining “Christian” rock….

Today I’d like to make my own confession. I’m a gear geek. When I go to a show, I’m looking to see what gear the lead guitarist is using to boost his sound during a solo (two TS-9s in tandem always works best, right?). When I listen to an album with a prominent bassline, I try to identify the frequency where the bassist’s compression kicks in, allowing for both a grainy, unmuddled bottom and a smooth, phattened high end (a distinction that is unfortunately washed over in poorly compressed audio files).

This propensity for “geargeekity” also manages to express itself in other spheres beyond the musical. When my academic institution installed a SmartBoard last year, I was eager to use it in seminars. Similarly, when we purchased Adobe CS4, I stayed awake at night thinking of all the possibilities for using Flash animation in teaching. And like everyone else, over the past year I’ve been researching e-readers for their PDF capabilities so I can take my favorite academic journals with me everywhere. (Forget the gear…perhaps I’m just a categorical “geek”!)

Yet last week I attended (more…)

Here is a short tutorial on hard rock genres, as seen and heard through the fingers of a (very good) guitarist on YouTube.

One could also give this lesson through the hands of a drummer or bassist, but the very fact that the electric guitar can by itself (actually, with the help here of a drum machine) sketch the genres is some small indication of just how central electric guitar playing is to rock music and culture. The guitarist’s gestures tend to become the paradigmatic ones. (Oh, sorry, did I forget to mention keyboards?)

That said, I once heard Jon Anderson, the lead singer of the Yes group, aver that a rock band is only as good as its drummer, and this has been confirmed constantly in my experience and observations of the rock scene. The other instruments can be guilty of many sins, but such sins will often be covered over — or better, resituated as meaningful musical events — with a good drummer articulating the space of the song. Conversely, any band long on guitars or vocals (or even keyboards) but short on drumming is almost guaranteed to fail. There is no holding-together guarantor if the drummer cannot do it, no matter how percussive the guitarists are.

What does this have to do with theology? I wonder how much theological work on popular music makes theological sense of such musicological phenomena as this “ideological” priority of the guitar and “musical” priority of the drums. Almost none, from what I have read (including my own work). As with so much of what we write here at R&T, here is an occasion for further learning.

Tom Beaudoin
New York City, United States

For this past Sunday’s New York Times, music critic Jon Pareles wrote a galloping, thoughtful synoptic take on Broadway’s turn to rock. In it, he pulls together “Hair” (R&T take here), “American Idiot,” “Fela!”, “Memphis,” “Million Dollar Quartet,” “Rock of Ages” (censed here at R&T), “Spring Awakening,” “Passing Strange,” “Rent,” and more, including mentions of rockish musical theater shows on the way, from Bono+Edge of the band U2 and Serj Tankian of the band System of a Down.

Pareles argues that whatever the cultural meanings, possibilities for creative invention, and built-in limitations of rock’s increasing dominance of Broadway, there remains something important the theater has trouble registering in rock: the incalculable, the spontaneous, the unrehearsed.

This is another space of overlap with theology: philosophical theology has been quite interested in denominating the theological valence of “the event” (for example, see John Caputo’s The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event), which is roughly translatable to, but not reducible to, the incalculable, the unrehearsed, the “unruly” — which leans us forward toward the future.

I am not so sure that rock in musical theater cannot offer revelatory spontaneity. For example, the rough divide Pareles draws between nostalgia and newness is frequently not simplistically borne out in studies of fans. Placing the event — in advance — is difficult.

Tom Beaudoin

New York City, New York, United States

It’s been many years since I checked in with the music of Steve Vai, certifiably divine god of guitar. But recently I’ve been watching this video of him playing a tune called “Building the Church,” and in between the multiple breath-catchings after each divebombing technical gesture, I’m thinking to myself, if this is building a church, make mine a cathedral. I don’t know anything about Vai’s background, but a quick scan on the web shows that he has a lot of religious-sounding titles for his songs: “For the Love of God,” “Whispering a Prayer,” “Sex and Religion,” and so on. Is there any theological work out there on Vai’s music? (And not, for readers new to this blog, to claim Vai for any religion but to try to critically calibrate what might be theologically significant about his music.)

He reminds me of the emphasis you find in the Catholic monastic tradition on exemplarity, delight in technique, even separation from oneself in practicing (at various points you can tell he is aware that he is wowing everyone and becomes a little mannered in his seduction, but that too is the privilege of those few like Vai who command rock’s Athos-Olympus).

It’s like watching a spiritual master; he is sonically painting so many feeling-scapes and inventing new ones, too, for himself and his audience. He conjures the spiritual power of the guitar, evident in the planned and unplanned squatting, stretching, turning of the trunk of his body and the way his hands sometimes try to pull sound out from the guitar even though they are not touching it.

Who first invented the knowledge of this power, “religious” people who lay hands over bodies, bread, or wine… or musicians who acknowledge that and what their instruments conduct — without the need for the formalities of words?

Tom Beaudoin

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, United States

Two recent accounts of “older” rock artists has me thinking about the pushing of rock’s older narrowly defined presumptions about age.

There was a time when it was a truism that rock culture was only for the “young,” defined as those in adolescence and young adulthood. Many theologians today, in academic and pastoral work, still make that presumption based on the codes of their own upbringing and the moral strictures of their job descriptions (that is, to peel people away from “childish things” and into “real faith”).

The trouble is that rock as a youngster’s (or even “young man’s”) game does not adequately describe what is happening in the multiple scenes of secular music in general or of rock in particular today. The two accounts I mention above focus on Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel, both of whom are reinventing their earlier music (what the industry calls “back catalogue” or simply “catalogue”) and writing fresh music past age sixty. (And in Ono’s case, well past 70.)

The music journalist Jon Pareles has both stories: he reports on Ono in concert recently here, and on Gabriel here. “Desperate and exposed”  and “deliberately exposed” is how Pareles describes Gabriel’s and Ono’s performances now. There are new collaborators, lyrics old and new, and voices sanded by time but wisely fuller in giving still what they used to promise: Gabriel’s wayfaring introspection, Ono’s proffered ingenuousness.

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