no more heroes

No more heroes anymore

(written april 2009)

Over the weekend I had a new experience. Once again I was dragged over to friends of my present girlfriend, something I do not wholly enjoy as I am the oldest person there, something that causes endless hilarity, and also because the couple in question always demand payment for services rendered. Imagine visiting friends on a Sunday afternoon and then being asked to pay for half the meal, after you have spent a few hours being reminded that there are a few grey hairs on your head.

However, this time events took a new course and I have been able to earn respect from the younger generation. After an expensive Sunday lunch the male half of the young couple thought it would be fun for us all to play on the newest game he has for his games console. Usually I deplore this type of thing, I am happy with a game on the Wiicubestation after several hours of enthusiastic drinking, but not a three in the afternoon when the sun is shining and there is fuel in the car.

The game in question is Guitar Hero; Metallica Edition. Here my interest came to life. Had I been wrong about this young fellow all this time? Was he also a fan of proper music, played with instruments, with words that even those in our thirties can understand? No he wasn’t. it transpired that he had bought the game on the recommendation of a gamers magazine, so he had leapt into his front wheel drive car and headed for the town centre. In his defence, the whipper snapper had also bought a copy of The Black Album to try and understand what the fuss was about.

Maybe there was some hope here, he might have heard it and been converted from the modern electric tripe that fills the charts in the modern world, yet he had listened to it once and described it as ‘alright’.

Alright? Now I am bloody sorry to have to say this, but the black album, also known as the snake album, is not alright, it is one of the best albums ever recorded. Anyone with an insight into guitar based rock had a copy, in fact if you were to survive a plane crash in a remote African desert, then it’s fair bet that some of the hitherto undiscovered tribesmen that came to your rescue would have a copy of the black album in their charming mud huts.

I was raised on many types of music, yet from the age where I was able to hold a tennis racket the wrong way up I have always loved music involving men with long hair and tattoos playing very loudly through Marshall amplifiers whilst ingesting quantities of drugs that would bring down every elephant in existence.

My early tastes were mainly from bands hailing from the Midlands in the early seventies. That most of the music that shaped a generation came from the Birmingham area is no mystery, they were all on strike and had nothing better to do than come up with many of the best tunes ever recorded. The Americans had not yet caught up at this point due to their misguided campaign in Vietnam. Fair enough they had ‘the doors’ and ‘Hendrix’ and all credit is due here, but I still maintain that the best music of the era came from England.

I remember when in 1982 my uncle came to dinner one evening complete with his latest purchase. It was an album called the Ace of Spades by Motorhead and if there was any defining moment where I became a ‘rocker’ than this was it. The fist single I purchased was the Clairvoyant by Iron Maiden and the first new fangled CD that came into my collection was Led Zeppelin IV, maybe the best album of all time.

Over the years my musical tastes have become more eclectic, but mostly my collection is centred around between three and five men, complete with long hair and tattoos belting out 12 bar blues through distortion pedals and shouting at a microphone. I can tell by ear what make of guitar is being used on each track and have a deep mistrust for anybody that cannot hear the difference between a Fender and a Gibson.

So as the young man was lifting up the plastic pretend guitar and preparing to amaze me with his skill at miming along to America’s finest ever metal band I will admit that I felt very happy. No matter how much he had been practicing, no matter how close he got to where the chords should have been on a stringless mock up of an ‘axe’, I was going to be much better. Not just better, I was going to blow him into next week with my skill.

He began with the opening track on the black album, and did a fair job of putting his hands in the right place. Then he did the same with a few more songs from the album before asking if the ‘old man’ wanted a go. I did and I went as far as asking that the song I wanted to play was Master of Puppets. He looked at me as if I were insane, that was in the advanced section, I knew it was but that was what I wanted to try, indulge an old man. Call me petty, but I will swear blind that there was a snigger as I lifted the ridiculously light toy over my shoulder.

The song started, as did I, hitting every note with perfect timing and continuing through the solo all the way to the last bars of the song, where the silicon brain controlling everything said that I was ‘Awesome’, a surprise as in all my 31 years I have never been awesome.

My shiny toothed nemesis was struck dumb, after a short pause he regained his use of his voice and asked whether I had played the game before. I hadn’t, instead I spent large amount of my teenage years locked in my bedroom with an electric guitar and a music book. I have never been that good, and will never earn a penny from all my efforts, but I don’t care. It was a great time and I loved going to watch bands and ‘jam’ with other musicians. And demonstrating that the gaming generation have no clue about what a real guitarist can do, even when it’s just miming along with a video game gives me a smug and warm feeling.

One further point came my way after the aforementioned laddie went on to confidently inform me that his favourite rock song was Kashmir by Queen. Here I laughed quite openly at him, mainly because I was sat there in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and put him straight. Kashmir is not by Queen it is a classic Zep song (Physical Graffiti, 1975, track 6 if you’re interested).

Yet here is the problem. When times where hard in the seventies the young men of Britain were turning out truly fantastic music. In the recession of 2009 all the potential talent is pretending to play guitars rather than actually buying a second hand stratocaster, and writing something for themselves.

Some of my heroes are the men that wrote the contents of my MP3 player, but to the new generation the guitar is just something that is used to play along with a video game, and even the bands that recorded the tracks in the first place are now just sprites that dance along on the tv. It makes me sad, no sick that the best albums ever to be recorded are probably already on the shelves.

The comparison between playing a computer game and doing the real thing cannot be measured. I have flown a Spitfire against the Luftwaffe over Southern England on my laptop, but I doubt that the RAF are thinking of calling me up when we have a few more Eurofighters. I may also find myself in trouble if I start stealing cars and shooting prostitutes in a Grand Theft Auto fashion.

But I can remember the days when I was there, complete with my former long hair and various heavy metal attire, head down and knocking riffs out of my Fender. I wasn’t very good, yet to the internet generation I am an ‘expert’.

In 1977 I was not yet born, but I was in the process of getting ready for it. The Stranglers asked “Whatever happened to those heroes?”. Well now I know, they are all playing on computer games, pretending to be musicians rather than learning how to play and maybe writing the next Stairway to Heaven.

No more heroes anymore…