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Glenn Frey

In the nine or so months we have been doing Garagrerocktopia, we have always tried to make our case abiout the music we love not by putting down other kinds of music or piling on artists, but by holding up what we like here – hook-driven, joyous rock and roll made by people who actually do like the music they’re making.

Have we taken a potshot or two on this blog? Indeed we have. But we try to keep it very general and try to keep it at a minimum.

I think the only artist we trashed at any length was Rupert Holmes, and we’re sorry, but anybody who makes songs like “The Pina Colada” song and “Him” deserves to have their chains yanked just a little bit. And hopefully, though we really don’t like these songs, a large amount of jest was evident.

But we also pointed out – and applauded – Holmes’ later successes with show tunes. If there’s anyone out there who has done nothing, in our view, of any merit, we simply don’t mention them. There are a lot of names you’ll never see on this blog. If we can’t find anything nice to say, then we’ll just avoid the issue altogether.

Why are we mentioning this?  Of course many of you heard the news last week that Glenn Frey of the Eagles died.

Gram Parsons

We’re not big Eagles fans here. In a lot of ways, their music typifies just about everything we don’t like about rock and roll –- it was very calculated, very processed in our view. They get a lot of credit – and deservedly so – for blurring the lines between rock and country, although in our humble opinion, Gram Parsons, both in his time with the Byrds and later with the Flying Burrito Brothers, did it first and did it much better.

That said, The Long Run album, and especially the title tune and “Heartache Tonight” are some of our biggest guilty pleasures – we literally check and make sure nobody sees us digging them.

But there’s no denying the Eagles success. We won’t get into that too much, but suffice to say, there

were a lot of people who didn’t see the Eagles the same way we do. If the bottom line is your measure of success, then few bands were more successful than the Eagles.

This post isn’t about the Eagles per se, but a phenomenon that some people are talking about – namely, the vicious trashing of somebody right after they departed their mortal coil. I haven’t investigated this too much, but apparently the troll army slithered out from under the rocks to say disparaging and disgusting things about Frey. Classy.

I’ve noticed, particularly in the age of the internet, that many people – primarily, it seems to me, young males – who have the luxury of living at home and having few apparent responsibilities and problems, take to the world wide web and seem to get very much into trashing music which often, they know nothing about.

I’m familiar with this mindset. I have worked in college radio for a day or two, and you see this very same sensibility from many whom, ostensibly, are amongst the best and brightest for their age.How many times I heard very bitter complaining from people about mainstream artists, sometimes to the point of trying to get others fired for playing them and damaging the records and CDs.

Often, this was done by people who at the same time couldn’t get enough of music where harmony, melody or anything approaching a good lyric was part of the equation.

Sadly, it’s not just teenagers and college kids who do this kind of thing. I don’t have the column near me, and I’ll have to paraphrase a bit (I saw no compelling need to save it). When George Harrison passed away in 2001, columnist George Will apparently just had to take the trouble and time to write about his befuddlement at the fuss over Harrison’s death. The closest thing I have to a direct quote was that Harrison was in no way an “epochal figure.”

We’ll leave it to you to dissect the roughly 35 separate and distinct kinds of petty Will displayed that day. Suffice to say, at the time September 11 was still very fresh, the war in Iraq was brewing and there were any number of potentially important stories the mainstream media was undercovering or ignoring, Will thought the world just couldn’t manage without his minimizing of a Beatle, one whose music, by the way, meant a great deal to us here.

Nor was it new at that time. Think back to Kurt Cobain’s death and you will find many such reactions from supposed adults.

I guess the mystery to me is, if you don’t like something, why pay it any attention at all? OK, full disclosure, in my teens and ‘20s I did the same thing. And I’m proud to say I outgrew that kind of thing oh, about 35 years ago. In fact, I let it go when I was in my ‘20s, which to my thinking, is about the time the hormones should fade and the berain starts kicking in.

It’s not just music, but on many topics, some amongst us cannot make a case for the music they like. They feel the need to trash other people’s taste. Again, the very nature of trolling is to get a reaction. We understand that. But why is it so predictably prevalent.

We won’t be playing a lot of Eagles or Glenn Frey and max volume around here. What we will do is recognize that he was a human being, he probably had a family and a lot of friends that loved him, and many fans that do feel a loss. To many people, his music did mean something, and it’s not up to Garagerocktopia to judge whether it’s valid or not.

Maybe we’re just a bunch of rubes here, but wouldn’t the world be just a teeny bit better place if more people looked for positive things to say once in a while?