Brothers in Arms or Dust in the Wind?

Now that rock as a mass phenomenon is turning 40, the big question it faces in 1996 and beyond is how to move forward into a meaningful middle age.

Elvis Presley became a household name in 1956, the year of his first national hits and TV appearances. In the 40 years since, rock’s great achievement has been its role as a cultural door-opener, a medium that could allow Everykid (and now that middle-age rockers are legion, Everyadult) a forum to be creative, to have a say, to reach out to the world.

Symbolically, at least, and sometimes in more tangible ways, rock, a child of black America, has been able to serve as a bridge and as a meeting place. It has given us a reason to hope that the walls between races and classes could crack, then fall.

But rock has also come to stand for the opposite of inclusion and common fellowship. The machinery of stardom turns more brazenly than ever. The pursuit of the big score goes on nakedly and unabated, at a time when the social glue that rock once seemed to reinforce appears to be loosening throughout society.

The big questions that America faces now are fundamental: Are we our brothers’ keepers? Or is survival of the fittest to be our governing rule? Should a privileged class sail ahead on the power of mind-boggling new technologies while masses of people are left flopping and gasping on society’s poop deck, like so many fish fallen through a collapsed societal safety net?

Or should we take to heart what Ben Franklin uttered at the birth of the nation that gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll: that we must all hang together, lest we all hang separately.

Rock’s legacy will be bound up with how these questions are ultimately answered in society at large. If inclusion and cohesion win out as the American Way, then rock’s good side--as a bridge and a conduit that bring people out of themselves and together with others--will have triumphed as well.

But if we wind up in some exclusionary nightmare of walled-off haves and desperate have-nots, rock will be seen, 100 years from now, as so much fiddling while another Rome burned.

All of which leads into my annual New Year’s pause for wishful thinking.

What, I wonder, would happen if those who have already become unconscionably rich playing rock music (broadly defined to include all modern pop genres) were to start thinking like brothers’ keepers?

What if these set-for-life individuals made the overall well-being of the music community their new priority, instead of pursuing big-score business as usual?

Could the sight of stars subsuming their own self-interest for the common good of all musicians set an example for society at large?

Human nature being what it is, I don’t think we’ll find out. But here are a few wishful proposals.

* In a new form of arts patronage, pop stars who don’t need to earn another cent should start diverting some of the cash surplus they generate to their worthy but struggling peers.

The simplest way would be for megastars to take favorite unheralded acts on tour to open the shows--and cut them in on a significant share of the profits.

Say the headliner grosses $350,000 a night--an amount well within the reach of performers who can sell out a Pond or an Irvine Meadows. Say further that, after all expenses for promoters, agents, managers, road crew and travel, the headliner pockets $70,000, or about 20% of the take.

If the opening act has played 40 minutes and the headliner for two hours, the opener has made one-fourth of the evening’s music. So, in an act of solidarity, why not have the headliner declare that the opener’s music, being on as high an artistic level as his or her own, should get one-fourth of the take-home profits? The opener would receive $17,500 from that $70,000.

Two or three weeks on the road under such an arrangement could float a struggling band for a year or two, freeing it to write and record without worrying unduly about financial pressures. For artists outside the commercial mainstream, it could become possible to make a decent living without a record deal at all.

This would be quite a gift to gifted creators of music who don’t have the luck to fit in with what’s massively popular. And it would be a resounding, and truthful, statement by those fortunate enough to be popular: that we should never confuse commercial rewards with musical merit.

* Under the brothers’ keeper ethic, stars negotiating their contracts with record companies could, in effect, negotiate for everybody else at the same time by insisting that all artist deals provide across-the-board provisions for accurate and timely accounting statements, solid royalty rates and other practices that would be fair and advantageous for musicians.

Under such a unified setup, any label tempted to neglect or trample on one of its low-selling ugly ducklings would risk breeching the contracts of its golden geese. To ensure fair treatment and decent pay for all, the megastars might have to sacrifice some of the lucre that they can now command. They’d still get by, and maybe some captains of American industry who love rock would be inspired to reconsider the shapes of their own pay scales and profit distributions.

* Say sayonara to souvenirs. T-shirts represent a big revenue source for pop stars. How revolutionary would it be for a star to refuse to be made into an idol, an advertising logo, a cult object, a commodity?

Rather than subordinating yourself to my identity, such a star might tell fans, I wish my music could somehow help you become more fully yourself. Take the T-shirt money and save up to buy a guitar, or spend it on some new music you otherwise wouldn’t have heard. You need a name or a face on your chest? Make it one that really counts, like Gandhi or Jesus or Buddha or Martin Luther King.