Rock On by Dan Kennedy

Author:Dan Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

SUBDIVISIONS

Sometimes I walk around the floors peeking in offices, like a tourist lost in a museum. You can’t help but feel how this is your last chance to see this. That none of the old-school mogul stuff is going to last too much longer — a little slice of American pop culture that might’ve peaked and is now almost gone without a trace. You look into these dioramas of offices and see the people who’ve been here who knows how long — separated off in a world that seems so far away from the day-to-day goings on of the middle class. And the older, wealthier, and higher up they are in the managerial caste system, the older their hairstyle is. The biggest offices can be the strangest little time capsules — mostly the men’s. The women seem to have an ability to move forward after their moment in the sun. The men, though . . . The guy who had something to do with discovering the band Rush twenty-five years ago apparently decided that very day that he would never change his hairstyle. The way a kid might declare that he would never wash his hand after meeting an absolutely peaking Evil Knievel in 1974.

When you walk by and look into the shadow box and see him sitting behind his huge desk and surveying his corner-office real estate like an isolated lord, you see a man who has been front and center for all of the highs, lows, hits, and stiffs of at least a couple of decades in this business. He looked up and smiled once as I was walking past stealing a glimpse, and I was stunned. This polite man behind such a huge desk in an enormous corner spread that looks bigger than a lot of apartments in this town — is he just a guy who learned the “smile and nod like a nice guy” trick? Because how the hell would a nice guy get anywhere in the record business? When you look in the couches, the huge living-room setting, the desk that is large enough to be called real estate, the art on the walls, the sculpture on the table in the center of the room, platinum albums lining the walls, each with their own little light focused on them — you see all this, but really, somehow, you keep coming back to the hair. When I learned that he’s the man who found Rush, or knew Rush, or managed Rush or whatever his thing is — I felt this weird kind of reckless, quiet, almost teenage melancholy sweep over me; because barring a building fire or a relapse back into my days of heavy drinking, I knew I’d never talk with him about the good old days that must’ve occurred at some point in this business. Here’s a guy who’s got to have some of the coolest stories in this building, he seems like a nice guy, and I’ll probably never hear his stories.

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