Why all TV series about rock music suck
Face it, there’s never been a great — hell, not even a passably good — TV series that captures the true essence of rock music: its power, its attitude, its scariness, its buffoonery. Many have tried; few have come even close.
Cameron Crowe’s latest attempt, Road
ies ( on Showtime), falls way short right out of the gate. Starring Luke Wilson and Carla Gugino, there’s just little here that says “rock ‘n’ roll,” other than the requisite tats and bottles of Jack Daniels and Lynyrd Skynyrd mementos.
First of all, who said roadies were interesting enough for a TV show? The opening episode — when it’s not focusing on female groupies in the throes of passion or fellating Bruce Springsteen’s microphone — asks us to take an interest in such crucial rock matters as lack of cof- fee and overpriced ice cream on a hotel bill. Huh?
As usual, in Crowe’s world, there are young people trying to find their path in life, and cooler, older people who are, like, all chill and guided by their Life Experience which is supposed to grant them even more exalted status.
Wilson is tour manager Bill, the Life Experience guy, shown banging an Asian-American hanger-on when the first episode opens (she’s studying paleontology, so she’s into — wait for it — “old bones”); there’s young Kelly-Ann (Imogen Poots), ready to quit the rock biz to enter film school; and Shelli (Gugino) as the tour production manager who will undoubtedly trade saliva with Bill. There’s even an alternate version of Tangled Up in
Blue (by Mr. Dylan Himself) on the soundtrack, to show us that Crowe has either really cool friends he can call up to ask for licensing rights, or a boatload of money to curate his dream background music. There’s also that overweening sense of the sly insider that Crowe specializes in: characters who adopt an annoying “knowing” look, the one that made Kate Hudson’s Penny Lane so frigging insufferable in Almost Famous. But, sadly, this isn’t
Almost Famous, because it takes place backstage, where, unless I’m completely wrong, not much of great rock ‘n’ roll interest goes on.
The show takes place in a world where rock is a biz: where promoters and tour managers have to hammer out last-minute riders for fledgling stars, where questions of mic levels and firecrackers in the audience are more pressing than, say, the future viability of one of America’s most important cultural exports. The “biz” side is embodied in a villainous Brit bean-counter who wants to cut corners backstage and rebrand the Staton House Band, who represent everything “authentic” about rock ‘n’ roll, as something “sexier.” In fairness, Roadies has good intentions, but it still comes off as group-hug therapy. Where’s the element of danger? Rock may be dead, but it doesn’t have to go out with such a whimper. As ’60s survivor Patsy pointed out in Ab Fab: “Nobody chokes on their own vomit these days.”
Meanwhile, as Showtime replaces rock ‘n’ roll with warm ‘n’ fuzzy, HBO pulls the life support on its showcase rock series, Vinyl, after only one season. Why? After low ratings, after replacing producer Terence Winter ( Sopranos) but sticking with producers Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, they probably just didn’t see much money there. Sure, the show was a hot mess of ’70s excess, but it arguably came closer, at least, to the attractions of rock ‘n’ roll. Plenty of drugs, of course, though not as much sex as the average Game of Thrones episode, and — crucially — not enough genuine rock ‘n’ roll energy. Jagger’s son, James, fronting a fledgling punk outfit in the early ’70s, did little but sneer and lean. Bobby Cannavale was effective as a perpetual eff-up, but it was Ray Romano who turned out to be the wild card: funny, nervy, and possessing perfect timing. Just like rock ‘n’ roll. The show could have used more of his on-target energy.
But maybe the problem isn’t television itself; maybe it’s the fact that oil and water just don’t mix. TV has been a great outlet for the face of rock, but never really its substance: through videos, concerts and other venues, we’ve amassed enough clips (on YouTube and in our collective memory banks) to have a reasonably good idea of how charisma comes through onstage — how it looks. On the other hand, crafting a TV drama that actually captures all the energy and manic threat of chaos implicit in, say, Jimi Hendrix dive-bombing his guitar at Woodstock or John Lydon vulturing over a microphone at Winterland is a little much to ask.
That’s why a dozen rock biopics can’t come close to watching the real Bob Dylan take the piss out of a reporter in DA Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back: charisma can’t be cloned. I mean, not even literary fiction can deliver a composite rock character that lifts itself believably off the page. So why would we expect a TV show to be able to do it?
And rock lifelines are notoriously unpredictable, as compared to TV storylines. If rock could be boiled down to the 30-minute template of “rock stars get into trouble, girls are involved, businessmen try to steal the money,” then we’d all still be watching episodes of The Monkees. Which no one is.
So we don’t really expect much from Denis Leary, whose own contribution to the DOA rock series canon, Sex & Drugs &
Rock & Roll, goes out of its way to wallow in rock clichés that are clichés for a reason. There’s always this old guy, see, who used to be a legendary rock producer about a million years ago, but now he has to confront the new generation with all its weird, newfangled ways and text emojis and whatnot. Insert Taylor Swift/Justin Bieber joke here, there, and everywhere. The gag is that the next-generation kid is his longlost daughter from a long-ago dalliance. And she wants to start a band. There’s occasionally a sharp line or two from Leary, but it all feels scripted, repackaged: ersatz. Which is something you can always sniff out when it comes to rock ‘n’ roll.
Seriously, I’d like to like even one of these shows without reservation, but they just seem to reside so far away from what actually makes/made rock music crucial to certain people at a certain point during the past century, that you just don’t want to bother. Might as well just fire up “Before the Flood” or “Live at Fillmore East” on vinyl, and blast away the tinhorn blues.