Can rock come back?

FROM the “don’t even think about it” vibe of the chain-link fence surrounding the unmarked building on Venice Boulevard to the security guard at the door, there’s a fortress-like quality about KROQ-FM’s L.A. headquarters.

The alternative-rock station clearly wants to avoid hordes of teenagers racing through the halls if Coldplay or OutKast stop by for an on-air chat with Kevin & Bean. But it’s also amusing to think the station needs to protect itself from radio programmers, eager to learn the latest trade secrets.

In the follow-the-leader world of modern rock radio, KROQ is the leader. For better or worse, it helped launch Nirvana and grunge in the early ‘90s (better) and rap-rock in the late ‘90s (worse). Nothing is more guarded than its new research figures, which list the 100 records that generated the most passionate response among KROQ’s 1.5 million listeners during 2003.

In an office dominated by a huge, autographed Eminem poster, Kevin Weatherly, Infinity/KROQ’s respected senior vice president of programming, clutches the findings with the protectiveness of an NFL coach holding a Super Bowl game plan. As he starts reading the records on the list, you see why. Rock has a new face, one that isn’t apparent from simply looking at weekly sales charts or lists of most-played rock records.

For nearly two years, critics have toasted a new set of “retro-rock” or “garage rock” bands that have brought intelligence and individuality back to the music, and this research shows that KROQ’s listeners have joined the party.

Of the 10 records most prized during 2003, seven were by bands associated with this new movement, including the White Stripes, the Strokes and Hot Hot Heat. Other new groups, including Jet, also show up prominently in the tally. These bands celebrate rock ‘n’ roll’s classic traits -- blazing guitars at once self-affirming and defiant, themes both questioning and comforting, and musicians who follow their hearts rather than compromising for sales.

Now, if history repeats itself and other stations around the country begin playing more of this new music, rock could make a serious run at regaining its authority and influence.

“I think it always starts on the coast and moves [to the heartland],” Weatherly says. “A lot of the playlists around the country are very conservative because listeners often resist change.

“When the White Stripes first came out, it wasn’t an automatic for our format. When we first played them, we had all the Limp Bizkit fans or whatever calling and going, ‘What is this? Why are you guys playing this?’ ” -- just as Smiths and Cure fans had called in 1991 when KROQ started playing Nirvana. “There were people saying, ‘Get that crap off the air,’ ” Weatherly says. “Sometimes you have to force it, sometime you have to stay with it.”

This brand of rock is a welcome and sweeping step beyond the one-dimensional anger and aggression of the late-’90s bands whose game plan was to simply exaggerate the legitimate disillusionment and assault of such great early ‘90s groups as Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails.

That strategy helped scores of acts from Limp Bizkit to Korn sell millions of records, but the music was so dark, dispiriting and hollow that it was not unreasonable five years ago to declare that rock was dead as an important mainstream art form.

That’s why songwriter-guitarist Steven Van Zandt speaks of the current rock uprising as nothing less than a revolution. He’s been part of rock for four decades, much of it at the side of Bruce Springsteen, and sees this new movement as a reconnection with classic rock, which he thinks started with Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” in 1965 and ended with Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994.

“After Cobain, we went back from a rock culture to a pop culture, and it is ridiculously inferior to the world we lived in,” says Van Zandt, whose syndicated radio show, “Little Steven’s Underground Garage,” airs at 10 p.m. Saturdays on KLSX-FM in Los Angeles.

“This new generation of kids is looking at hard rock and hip-hop and pop as their father’s or their older brother’s music. They want something new, something smarter and with more personality, something that can shape pop culture the way rock once did.”

Still, it’s easy to dismiss these “retro-rock” groups as simply recycling old sounds, the final gasps of a dying musical culture. Rock’s share of the album market has dropped from nearly 50% in the late ‘80s to less than 25% during 2002, and most of these new bands, for all the media acclaim, are almost invisible on the national pop charts.

For every argument that rock is dead, however, there is a convincing argument to the contrary.

Record companies have been signing more daring bands, from the fun-minded rock noir of the Raveonettes to the Southern fried/Stones-accented rock of the Kings of Leon. Indie labels also are introducing valuable new voices at a dazzling pace.

In assessing the health of rock, the ultimate question for the rock fan may be as simple as the old political standby: “Do you think you are better off now than you were four years ago?”

The White Stripes alone make a compelling case that the answer is yes.

The retro issue

Because so much of the new music echoes qualities of ‘60s and ‘70s rock, the term “retro rock” is frequently applied, which is fine unless it is interpreted as simply nostalgia. That misconception seriously underestimates today’s young rock audience and the vast talents of such musicians as the Stripes’ Jack White.

What attracts listeners to the Strokes, another movement leader, isn’t that the band’s sensual, guitar-driven approach reminds them of the great ‘60s band the Velvet Underground. Unless they are unusually sophisticated, 16-year-old Strokes fans haven’t even heard the Underground’s music.

“This new music just sounds fresh compared to what has been going on for the last 10 years,” says Rick Rubin, the much-admired record producer who has worked with Johnny Cash, the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Petty.

“I remember growing up and loving Aerosmith when I was in junior high school. It wasn’t like I was looking back at the Rolling Stones, which older people kept saying about Aerosmith. To me, they were the start of something.”

Just as the most acclaimed filmmakers pay lavish homage to past heroes, rock has freely built on the work of earlier generations. When the Beatles first came out, their light, exuberant records reminded many in this country of the ‘50s music of Little Richard and the Everly Brothers.

Bob Dylan didn’t hide his affection for folk immortal Woody Guthrie. Bruce Springsteen seemed for a while to be a mixture of Dylan’s artistry and Elvis Presley’s charisma. Cobain’s songs had a definite Lennon-McCartney flair.

Eventually, these artists established their own vision in ways that, in turn, influenced new generations of musicians.

This evolutionary cycle again is beginning anew in White, the 28-year-old Detroit rock auteur who draws upon the artistic independence of Dylan, the underdog sensibilities of Cash, the bawdy blues-man fervor of Robert Johnson and the sweet pop undercurrents of Burt Bacharach.Yet White mixes these influences with his own rock vision in ways that none of those artists ever imagined. No one was more surprised than Bacharach himself when the Stripes scored a No. 1 record last year in England with a dynamic reworking of the old Bacharach-Hal David tune, “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself.”

Referring to White, Andy Slater, the Capitol Records president who signed the Vines, says: “I think you have it all with him. You have the songs and a guy with a modernist view of classic blues-folk. The Hives have this synthesis of a bunch of eras. The Vines are part psychedelic, part grunge, part this melodic flair. If these bands were just redoing the past, we’d be speaking Boogie Nights.”

The sales factor

If these new bands are so good, shouldn’t they be selling more, given the almost universal critical support?

After all, Nirvana’s major label debut, 1991’s “Nevermind,” sold 10 million copies. The Stripes’ acclaimed “Elephant” has sold only 1.25 million copies.

That placed the album at No. 47 among the year’s biggest sellers -- way behind “American Idol” faves Kelly Clarkson and Clay Aiken. None of the other new bands, including the Strokes and Kings of Leon, came close to making the year-end Top 100 sales list.

But times have changed greatly since Nirvana, KROQ’s Weatherly notes. It’s much harder now for alt-rock bands to get the massive, national exposure that leads to Nirvana-like sales.

With the rise of hip-hop and pop, rock has become a minority player both on MTV and mainstream radio, which means it’s far more difficult to get the kind of saturation exposure that helped Nirvana leap to fame.

Joe Levy, the music editor of Rolling Stone magazine, once the bible of rock, underscores the challenge faced by the new bands in breaking through that pop curtain when he points out that no subject works better for Rolling Stone subscribers today than pop. By that he means Justin Timberlake (named the magazine’s artist of the year for 2003), Britney Spears and Aiken.

But he’s personally a fan of the new music and believes the sales figures of many of the new bands have been likely hurt by downloading.

“These bands appeal to an audience that is no longer particularly interested in buying records,” he says. “If the Stripes record sold 1.2 million copies, you can easily guess they have five times that audience, if not greater. Their audience is young, smart, computer savvy and anti-corporate. They are less likely to buy a record than download it. So the impact of the Stripes and bands like the Strokes may be far greater than conventional measurements suggest.”

Even looking at the actual sales figures of the Stripes, you can see how greater radio exposure across the country could make a quick and major difference.

At present, Los Angeles is the biggest market for both the Detroit-based Stripes and the New York-based Strokes, thanks in large measure to the KROQ exposure.

As rock’s leadership role faded during the last decade, the creative momentum and, accordingly, the young fan allegiance shifted to hip-hop, whose leading figures reflected more of the rebellion and street-level urgency of early rock ‘n’ roll than the cartoonish anger brigade.

No one believes it will be easy to regain that allegiance.

“For rock to recapture its cultural role, a kid has got to say subconsciously, ‘I’m going to dress like that guy who is expressing what I’m feeling better than me,’ ” says Jimmy Iovine, the visionary chairman of the Interscope Geffen A&M; Records Group who worked in the studio with John Lennon, Springsteen and U2 and who signed Dr. Dre, Tupac Shakur and Eminem.

“There’s more kids saying, ‘That’s me,’ about what they see and hear in hip-hop and pop right now than there is in rock. I think some of the new bands, including the Stripes, are promising, but they face a major challenge.”

A big year ahead

This could be a pivotal year for this fledgling movement. Some of the bands that contributed greatly to the buzz of 2002, including the Hives and the Vines, will be back with new records.

Like Rubin and others, however, Iovine said he’ll take things a band at a time. His roster includes the Hives and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, an arty-punk New York group, because he believes in them, not because they are part of a movement. They represent just a fraction, however, of the Interscope Geffen A&M; roster.

Even if the new bands don’t recapture the public imagination in a big way, they can play an essential role in rock.

From the ‘60s, rock has traveled parallel courses. There have been the bands, from the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to Springsteen and U2, who have dominated their times commercially as well as creatively.

But there has been another immensely important group of musicians who thrive outside of the glare of the Top 10 -- a group that goes back to Lou Reed and Gram Parsons in the ‘60s and continues through the punk-minded ‘80s tradition of Black Flag, X, Jesus and Mary Chain and the Replacements.

Even if the Stripes and the best of the other new bands only join that list of rock cornerstones, they will have done much to keep the music alive. Five years ago, rock had only a legacy. Now, it again has a future.

Robert Hilburn, Times pop music critic, can be reached at Robert.hilburn@latimes.com