Rock Fans Vs Rock Bands

I read a lot of musician biographies and autobiographies. Life by Keith Richards is good and I really like Many Years From Now, the Paul McCartney bio by Barry Miles. Outside of a very few, and I’ve read around thirty, they aren’t very concerned with music or the music business. Grace Slick’s autobiography was a kiss and tell and if you didn’t already know, you might not realize she’s in music. I didn’t mind that as I always have had a crush on Grace and it wasn’t because of her singing. After Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis I decided to quit reading rock star bios as I realized they are, for the most part, a story about alcohol and drug addiction, not music or pop culture and Scar Tissue was particularly harrowing and depressing to read. I hope he’s okay now, he has a new record out so at least he’s still alive.
What my reading material made me realize is that the story of Rock & Roll is being told in print and movies from the point of view of people who are anomalies, not the common story. With the exception of The Beatles who were always Rock fans first and foremost, most of the other stories are about people who only became rockers because the Beatles made it profitable. The Stones, The Yardbirds, The Animals and Led Zeppelin started as blues bands. Outside of Chuck Berry, Keith Richards rarely mentions any other rockers in his book, only blues guys. Jefferson Airplane started as a Peter, Paul & Mary style folk act, the Grateful Dead, a blue grass / jug band, Steve Stills and Richie Furay of Buffalo Springfield were in a New Christy Minstrels style group and Neil Young was in an R & B group with Rick James, of all people. The Byrds were a folk band and as the Detours, The Who played maximum R & B with Keith Moon wanting to be in a surf band.
The story of a successful rock band is the story of life in the eye of a hurricane but the real story of Rock and Roll lies in the swirling madness that surrounds that eye wherever it travels. The real world of Rock & Roll is the experiences, the emotions, the adventures, the memories and the hopes and aspirations of the FANS.
After Steve Spielberg directed Schindler’s List he realized the stories of the actual victims of the Holocaust were being lost as that generation started to die out so he started a program of recording their individual stories and reminiscence to preserve for posterity. Later, after Saving Private Ryan, he started doing the same for World War Two veterans. What we need, and I’m not comparing Rock & Roll fans to Holocaust survivors or World War Two vets, but we Rock fans aren’t going to be around forever and we’re not getting any younger either so perhaps we should start putting our stories out there for future generations to be able to understand the whole Rock Era phenomena. Really, if I didn’t live through it and only had these sensationalized rock star bios with which to judge, I’d never understand the appeal of Rock music and would have to consider it the scourge the old folks in the 1950s warned us it was.