The Accidental Rock Snob

A few months back, I saw something in Entertainment Weekly about a book I knew I had to have: The Rock Snob’s Dictionary: An Essential Lexicon of Rockological Knowledge by David Kamp and Steven Daly. It just arrived the other day, and my only complaint is that it’s too short. Yet I can hardly fault a book that includes many beloved artists, such as Big Star, MC5, Gram Parsons, Crazy Horse, the Small Faces, Wilco, the Last Poets, Gang of Four—even Ennio Morricone, composer of the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in the West.

If none of the aforementioned number among your faves—if, as is likely with most normal people, none or all but a few of them are completely unknown to you—then you don’t inhabit the weird world of the rock snob. And ever since buying this book, I’ve begun calling myself that, though with enormous reservations.

I’ve always despised true snobbery of the “you can’t belong to our club” kind, yet I’ve certainly been one for reverse snobbery along the lines of “my childhood was more underprivileged than yours.” Yet my identity as a rock snob comes quite by accident. I don’t look down on people who enjoy pop; in fact, I have a soft spot for some of the most sappy pop songs of my younger years in the 1970s: “Shannon” by Henry Gross, for instance, for “Just When I Needed You Most” by Randy VanWarmer. (BTW, when I went looking for the spelling of this guy’s name, I discovered that he had died early last year.) And—admittedly, thanks to my wife, though with little protest from me—our CD rack includes greatest-hits packages for such icons of the 1970s pop pantheon as Abba, the Babys, and the Bee Gees. (In the addition to the disco-era Bee Gees hits, I recently added a collection that features their hits of an earlier incarnation more favored by rock fans: “Massachusetts,” “Lonely Days,” etc.)

Anyway, the fact that I’m a rock “snob”—personally, I would feel more comfortable with afficiando or connoisseur—ultimately arises from that I have already gone through all the classics, and need something more. For people who have already “done” the Beatles and all the other major bands (and I even wrote a book about them, as well as a three-volume reference set profiling rock, pop, and R&B stars of a more recent vintage), there’s really nowhere else to go. Album-oriented radio is hopelessly boring, being confined to essentially the same song list they had when Jimmy Carter was president. Oh, they’ll throw in an occasional Nirvana track just to try to let you know they’re with it—apparently not knowing that Kurt Cobain has been dead for well over a decade. And if you try to listen to only current music, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll ultimately be drawn back to the classics—to a time when rock n’ roll still seemed fresh and open to virtually limitless experimentation.

So it’s into the realm of the rock snob that I have gone, always looking for the “new” thrill from some previously undiscovered closet classic. On my playlist currently, for instance, are Jeff Beck’s Truth and greatest hits packages by Savoy Brown, the Staple Singers, and Curtis Mayfield. I don’t belong among the ranks of the true haute rock snobs: Forever Changes by Love is still only on my Amazon wish list, as yet unheard by me, and I don’t own anything (yet) by Van Dyke Parks, the Stooges, or the Meters. But I will eventually, if only because I’ve heard all the classics one time—or more like a thousand times—too many.

P.S. In addition to the artists on my current playlist, none of which are included in this book, I would humbly submit the following as some suggestions for a future edition of this extremely entertaining reference work:

Bauhaus
John Cage
Stanley Clarke
Rick Derringer
Robert Johnson
The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices
NRBQ
John Prine
Dakota Staton
Status Quo
The Strawbs
United States of America
Tom Waits (too mainstream, perhaps? The fact that one would even have to ask such a question about Mr. Gravel Voice says a great deal about the difficulty of maintaining one’s rock snob credentials.)