The Sphinx Must Be Dyin': What's Killing Rock and Roll? (Part I)

Back on Friday, September 6th, 2024, I dragged my mother along with me to go to a Zebra concert at the Tally Ho Theater in Leesburg, Virginia. The concert lasted from 8-11 pm and was roughly three hours of some of the best ‘80s hard rock/heavy metal I’ve ever heard. 

At this Zebra concert, I was without a doubt the youngest person in the room. The audience was what you would expect for a band that sounds the way Zebra does: primarily men in their fifties who had pony tails and yet were going bald simultaneously, a few metal heads in their twenties of the long and short-haired varieties, a couple girlfriends of these men who may or may not have actually been fans of the band, a man recording the entire show on his phone, and me and my mom.

I don’t know how many people exactly were in the audience, but it was enough to fill up the floor in front of the stage (of which most of the venue was comprised, it being a small place). Of course, all the oldest geezers in the audience got to the barrier first, but I didn’t really mind. Apart from the chances of catching a guitar pick being increased, I wasn’t going to get that much out of being right at the front anyways–two and a half rows deep into an audience was close enough. 

To say I felt out of place at that Zebra concert would be an understatement–I felt like a fraud. Being a hippie in both political and presentation aspects, I felt like I was pulling a con not just on my fellow concert goers but on the band itself. How dare I, a hippie who can’t even sit through a Metallica song without getting bored, enjoy a group that is considered by everyone in the room, to be metal? My mom having to act as my chaperone (as I didn’t have my licence) and her not even knowing this group existed a month before we went to the show certainly didn’t help. But me feeling like a fish out of water didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t there for the crowd. I was there to watch a band I like play some tunes for a couple of hours. 

This Zebra concert had an opener, however, a fact of which I was unaware of until said opener actually started playing some cover songs (up until that point, I wholeheartedly believed they were the road crew).

The Gavin Evick Band at the Tally Ho Theatre. Photo by me.

The band was very creatively called The Gavin Evick Band, and they were doing covers of songs by groups like Skid Row (among other 80s metal standards that I for the life of me cannot recall). And they could fuckin’ wail. They had the presentation, they had the skill, and they played at least one original song as the highlight of their set. Even for someone who doesn’t particularly get my kicks out of tried and true heavy metal, I know a bad ass band when I see one. 

The one original The Gavin Evick Band played was very consistent with the styles of the cover songs they were singing. The songwriting was on point (if amateurish, but I’m not going to shun them for something like that so early in their careers), the instrumentation was solid if a little lighter then I would’ve expected, and the band clearly studied all the greats of metal to learn how to properly carry themselves. The only thing the song suffers from when not being played live is the sin of modern production techniques, but then there isn’t anything any of us can do about that. 

The Gavin Evick band have all the chops that would’ve made them at least mildly successful in the 1980s. But they’re victims of circumstance, being forty years too late for their own music. 

Obviously, The Gavin Evick Band can’t be the only group of young musicians desperately pushing for a revival of the music they love, but if there are more then I haven’t seen them. I try to be optimistic about these sorts of things when it comes to up-and-coming rock bands, but the most optimistic outcome I can think of for groups like The Gavin Evick Band is that they’ll get decently popular in a couple of college towns or maybe a small city for a couple of years, and then can ride that high for a while before settling down and living a domestic life from their forties onwards.

I do not see new, real rock groups becoming famous anytime soon. But I don’t know these guys: They’re probably aware of the fact that they aren’t going to become a stadium-filling rock band in their own right. Maybe they’re comfortable playing as the openers for bands that are only slightly more popular then them, having to play covers between their own songs to keep the customer satisfied. And maybe they’re fine with that. 

Actually, I can think of one more example of a band trying to emulate the sounds of rock past: Greta Van Fleet. 

As someone who refuses to willingly listen to any song released after 1987, I do not care in the slightest about Greta Van Fleet, and I am not going to indulge in listening to them outside of song snippets in car commercials any time soon. That doesn’t mean that I can’t respect what they’re trying to do. 

The Greta Van Fleet album that was going for $100 (Lava Records)

The first time I saw a Greta Van Fleet album floating around a record store, it was going for a hundred bucks. Since I had never heard of the band before and taking note of the price, I assumed that they were some obscure seventies group that had had a resurgence in popularity long after they broke up, and non-reissue copies of their records were now coveted items among die-heard collectors, much like what has happened to The Velvet Underground.

That would also explain the comparisons to Led Zeppelin I had heard in relation to them–everyone from Queen to Rush were being compared to Led Zeppelin back in the seventies by music critics, all the more fodder for assuming Greta Van Fleet were a seventies group. And boy, could I have not been more wrong. 

According to the data on the group’s Spotify profile (accuracy aside), the group has approximately 3.7 million people listening to them on a monthly basis and have sold out 250 shows, including every show they have headlined. Allegedly they’re in quite the high demand, with their most recent output being in 2023 (two years ago at time of writing). They have exactly three full studio albums, and have been active on the music scene since 2012. They’ve even won a couple of awards in their time, including a Grammy for best rock album for their second EP in 2017. If this were the seventies and their output were a little more prolific, then they would be on the road to superstardom right now. So why haven’t I heard anything about this band since 2023? 

The main problem apart from band inactivity and industry (which we will come back to later) is, itself, rock fans. We’re stuck in our ways, we’re peevish when it comes to music not made in our favorite time periods for the stuff–we know what we like.

Photo by George De Sota

Personally, I can at least (begrudgingly) harbor a few iotas of respect for whatever it is Greta Van Fleet are trying to accomplish with their sound, but they wear their influences on their sleeve. I guess I can see why people like them, but unfortunately for them, if I’m in the mood to listen to something that sounds like Led Zeppelin, I’m just going to put on some Led Zeppelin. 

Greta Van Fleet can try all they want to sound like a rock band of yore, but so long as they’re stuck recording things digitally, it isn’t going to happen. It won’t matter how live your playing is, how much emotion you’re putting in to it, which producer you’re working with or whether you’re using a real guitar or not: the song is going to come out sounding too polished and pristine no matter how much you want to capture that sacred starglow energy that can now only be found in the rare live performances by modern bands that remain as untouched by the advents of modern technology as possible. 

However, this notion doesn’t just go for Greta Van Fleet. I can hardly bring myself to listen to music made past the eighties for bands that I do like–hell, for bands that I’ve loved for years–because at some point the production gets too squeaky clean and modern and I can’t stand it anymore.

A good example of this would be Yes: in 2023 they released their twenty-third studio album, titled Mirror to the Sky. Of course, there are other reasons to not want to listen to Mirror to the Sky, the main being I haven’t even gotten through most of the music the band released since 1980’s Drama. But the reason I have never even considered giving even one song off the album a listen is because I know it won’t sound like the Yes that I love, the incarnation of Yes that hasn’t existed since 1973, and I want to save myself the disappointment. 

Most bands of the sixties, seventies, and eighties did not get the privilege of creating music far beyond their years, however. And many of these final efforts, which were often produced in tumultuous situations or bad breakups, leave sour tastes in the collective mouths of rock fans. Groups as lauded as The Who, Led Zeppelin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and The Cars never got that chance to carry over into the next century–hell, CCR could barely make it into the next decade–they never got the right to disappoint us all one last time, and chances are they never will again. 

New rock music doesn’t have a place in the industry anymore, and it’s been looking like it won’t ever again since the nineties. Very little of what I’ve heard could classify in even the broadest of terms as true rock, and even less of it has a single shred of quality. Industry is probably the main reason bands like Greta Van Fleet have never truly broken out the way bands used to be able to, and most people who like Greta Van Fleet don’t seem very keen on keeping the music of the past alive. 

The top five songs in the Top Forty on June 21, 2025. Notice a distinct lack of rock music.

Nobody who listens to modern Top Forty radio is going to want to tune in, expecting the over-produced, electronic pop schlock that they’ve become accustomed to over the past ten years just to hear a guy wail mystical-sounding lyrics over some guitar and drums, and the young people who like Greta Van Fleet aren’t going to get nearly as deep into the world of  classic rock as people used to because this allows them to dodge the bullet that is having to come to terms with the fact that you will see your favorite musicians die. 

I can understand why the dead are such a repellent for young people when it comes to rock music. If I was a lesser man, then I probably would’ve been put off by it as well. 

So much of what being a fan of classic rock now is, is fantasy. You can trip yourself perpetually on imagining seeing the original line up of Foreigner, or attending a Queen concert before Freddie Mercury died, or watching Jimi Hendrix burn his guitar at Monterey Pop live and in person. Hell, it could even be something as simple as seeing Cheap Trick live, a perfectly achievable dream that still probably won’t get fulfilled because of circumstance. But those fantasies are just as sacred as the real thing, if not more. So long as you are aware in the back of your mind that it’s never going to happen. 

Back when rock was the dominant music format, especially at the height of groups like Aerosmith, The Doors, or The Grateful Dead, rock stars were on par with American folk heroes like John Henry or Davy Crockett long before they were allowed to become real people. They represented the Common Man and His Struggle, they spoke for the youth and, like them, were ever tormented by The Man Upstairs.

They spoke to everyone and only you, the listener, simultaneously. They were the cooler older brothers you never had, the stories and advice you never got from your parents, the idols, the leaders and the mentors for almost twenty years. Long after they have fallen by the wayside, they still remain ever present in the larger collective consciousness of the western world and still represent an idyllic form of the American Dream. 

Fans at a Rolling Stones concert, presumably in the 1970s. Photographer unknown.

Rock concerts used to be rites of passage, sacred religious ceremonies that only cost you four dollars to get in to: the skeptics, critics, and the believers alike. For a low, low price, you were allowed to get away from it all–from the responsibilities of school or work, from your overbearing parents, from the general teen angst–for a couple of hours. For a couple of bucks you could get as close to the Saints and Saviours of a generation as the security guards would let you. For a couple of bucks you could feel like you belonged in a room with other people instead of like a fish out of water. 

Concerts simply aren’t like that anymore.