A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR.

In my most formative years I lived in a very musical house and learned banjo, guitar, piano, bass, and dSrums at a very young age, and when I came under the mesmerizing spell of a certain mythological British quartet known as the Fab Four, I decided exactly what I wanted to be: a Rock Star.

This was a fantasy far beyond the question of 'what do you want to do when you Grow Up?' It was what I wanted to BE, then and for all time, not a career, but a way of defining myself, in fact of creating myself.

With two Panasonic cassette recorders I built a 'studio' in my bedroom, with a drumset made of cardboard boxes and frying pans that I played with chopsticks. I drew imaginary album covers and struck rock star poses in the mirror with my stepfather's blue Gibson SG. I practiced incessantly. But the dream of being a Rock Star, although it incorporated being a Musician, was also more than that. It was the desire of a shy and introspective 12 year old to be an icon; to be the center of attention, to be charismatic and sexually appealing, to be literally above the crowd.

This was the early and mid-70's, also the era of Big Rock Stars; bands like PInk Floyd, ELP, YES, Genesis, The Who, and countless others played Big Arena Shows, and made Big Concept Albums about Big Topics. It was a pretentious and bombastic and self-important pose the Rock Star struck in those times. The music was often brilliant, always ambitious, generally pompous and as a rule overcommercialized; yet at heart it was inspired by deep idealism and the dreams of 12 year old geeks in bedrooms like mine. The Rock Star of these times saw himself without irony as a spiritual guru, a political leader, a sexual revolutionary and artistic visionary all in one; he built a great dayglo colored edifice on these foundations -- which came crashing down quite suddenyl when punk and new wave came along to topple it with irony and understatement.

In similar fashion, my rock star dream had become considerably tarnished by the time I actually started writing real songs and playing on real stages. By the time I started an eleven-year odyssey with God Street Wine, in 1988, the idea was no longer that we would be the next Beatles, or the next Stones, or even the next Floyd; you just wanted to find a niche, build a following, and be able to make a living. Superhero guitar solos, leather pants, and drummers with 2 kick drums and a gong behind them were the stuff of comedy.

And yet still even when I was playing in bars, driving around the country in a Chevy Sport Van, and sleeping at the Red Roof Inn, there remained a kernel, a tiny bit of the Rock Star Dream that was in fact its essence; the central seed that bears within it everything that is important about the fruit, even when the more superficial parts have decayed away; and that seed I would attempt to describe as this: the idea that as a rock musician I was playing not only an entertainment but in fact a spiritual role in the life of the audience.

I felt, if I can manage to explain, that in the basically materialist and spiritually void culture that ours has become, the devotion and passion accorded to musicians, artists, and entertainers is often the only available path to fulfillment of a quasi-religious yearning in people who generally have no outlet for these deep feelings. I certainly identified that devotion within myself, when it came to artists for whom I had a great admiration as a young music fan (before the fan in me metamorphosized from a worshiper into an admirer of craft). And I certainly noticed that some of our fans used to analyze and often argue about our simple music with a passionate dogmatism that resembled nothing so much as the theological passion of the Benedictines, say, and take an interest in us, our sayings and doings, in what I can only call a very New Testament fashion.

Don't imagine I had messianic tendencies, or that I even went so far as to imagine that rock music was in any way a religion. I knew, by this time, that my chosen venue of expression was a bastardized and lowbrow form of art, driven by the vulgar realities of the commercial music industry and the tastes of the lowest common denominator. I knew that to mistake its occasional outward similarities, in terms of concerts, to religious ritual for a true religion was as silly a mistake as to be led on by its occasional tendency to drop a hint that it might, in fact, contain answers to the Big Problems of being and existence; and yet I did believe, and perhaps even still do, in the spiritual properties of music for music's sake, and I did think that if not actually answering the Unanswerable Questions, music at least provided us with some genuine non-spurious consolation for our inability to answer them. And I undoubtedly felt that in the best performances there was a spiritual communion between audience and performers that was transcendent in nature.

These are the ways in which, despite my progressive disillusionment, I still did believe in the Rock Star Idea through the years in which I was actually onstage attempting to literally be a rock star -- (an attempt at which I was only intermittently successful, by the way, and which ultimately was disastrous).

With the decline and eventual breakup of God Street Wine--which were parallelled by the simultaneous decline of the music scene in the world outside, the catastrophic mistakes of the record labels, the death of radio, and the culture-killing conglomeration of the major media--the Rock Star idea in my head decayed and died; perhaps not only in my mind, but in the culture outside as well. And when I became the father of a little girl in May of 2001, it was put to rest without regrets, as part of an earlier phase in my life; as the juvenile fantasy of an insecure child, beset by feelings of powerlessness; as the shallow bombast and transferred sexual energy of an adolescent; as the blend of arrogance and idealism that so characterizes youth and is so anathema to the grownup.

So, getting on at last to 'FRIDAY NIGHT FREAK SHOW', this is in some fashion my ode to the little Rock Star Boy in myself. I find that Boy, like the Boy in the show, quite ridiculous, self-important, and insecure, and far too intent on being charismatic by whatever means are at his disposal in order to obscure these qualities. He is a ludicrous dream, from the point of view of a father in his 30's, and on the whole I am happy to see him go; but in part I am sad, too, and I would like to see him go somewhere else and be happy; and in part I wonder, too, if the process we call 'maturing' is not in fact quite indistinguishable from the process we call 'dying'--whether these youthful and obsolete parts of our personae, that we discard as we age and take on new responsibilities, are not in fact the aberrations we make them out to be, but are in fact the very essence of being alive. Do we willingly surrender, on our deathbeds, and tell ourselves that we have finally outgrown the ultimate immaturity, that of having the temerity to live?

Boy-O, in the story, is alleged to be a delusion in the mind of Freddie; but is he not in fact far, far more real? With all his absurdly melodramatic obsession with the world of his own emotions, with his music, with his pathetic quest, is he not alive in a way that the passive Freddie, whose life is irrelevant, could never be?

As far as the culture goes, the Big Rock Stars have gotten Big houses with pools, where they probably sip alcoholic beverages in a lounge chair next to attractive though distant women, much like Boy-O in 'Waiting For The Tide'. Boy-O himself, as far as he ever actually existed, has sailed into the land of Schnoozis years ago; for better or worse we have decided we had no use for him. Certainly we still have rock music, and will continue to have it, just as we still have Coca-Cola even though it no longer has quite the novel impact it must have back in 1899. But the Rock Star is gone, and we smugly congratulate ourselves on this fact, thinking we have grown up -- and maybe we have -- but in a morally and spiritually empty culture, and one that has apparently decided it no longer needs to read, educate itself, or create challenging art and music -- wasn't he, with all his foibles, better than nothing? -- and may we not decide one day that we miss him after all? --

Lo Faber
June 2003