In the spring of 1997, my manager at my job tells me "A fraternity brother from college is on the management team for Better Than Ezra. They're on a club tour and they're gonna be in town soon. He says I can have up to ten tickets. Wanna go?"
My answer: "Sure!"
So, a couple of weeks later, I'm in a bar on Huger Street in Columbia, South Carolina, drinking Shiner Bock and watching Better Than Ezra belt out hits like King Of New Orleans and Desperately Wanting with my manager, his buddy, and a few hundred others.
That was my last rock concert... my last one until the Friday before Memorial Day, 2022.
What act brought me out of rock concert retirement after 25 years, 8 address changes, two career changes, a second college degree, a wedding, that bride's funeral, another wedding, and becoming a father of twins?
The Warning: three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico... none of whom were born when the doorman took my ticket at that South Carolina bar a quarter century ago.
How did they do it?
Simply put, they -- 22-year-old Daniela (Dany), 20-year-old Paulina (Pau), and 17-year-old Alejandra (Ale) -- are the real deal at a time when rock can use a few more real-deal bands (more on that later).
When I hear them, I hear extraordinary, guitar-driven rock. Full stop. It's amazing on its own merits -- this band does not want or need any special consideration because the band is all women or because they were all born in the 2000s or because their first language was not English (they mostly perform in English; two songs that routinely make their concert playlist are in Spanish). Their music both is true to the brand of rock grandfathered by Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and having been upheld by Van Halen, AC/DC, Metallica, and Foo Fighters plus it carries the unique stamp of the talented women who wrote and performed it.
The only song on their playlist that they didn't write: an authorized cover of Metallica's Enter Sandman... which was recorded (with Alessia Cara) for Metallica's 2021 Blacklist album.
The Warning's concert material includes their current Mayday EP, produced by David Bendeth, plus earlier songs they independently produced prior to signing with Lava Records. As talented performers in a cohesive band, they create tremendous musical depth with just three instruments plus their three voices. I couldn't swear in a court of law that all the songs I heard in their show at The Rebel Lounge in Phoenix on May 27 had zero pre-recorded material, but I could swear 85% of the songs were strictly what Dany, Pau and Ale brought to the stage in that moment.
I used to be in TV news; I had to learn NOT to write long. I could try to write hundreds of words explaining the magic when Dany straps on her custom Paul Reed Smith guitar and steps up to the mic... hundreds more on Pau's brilliance as a songwriter, drummer, singer, and, as needed, screamer... and hundreds more on how Ale is both a rhythmic and tonal backbone of the band plus rock-steady at harmony lyrics. But that would be wasting everybody's time -- mostly mine.
YouTube tells that story far better than I could. It would take you less than 24 minutes to watch all 6 of their official music videos in their official music videos playlist, plus another 4 minutes to watch Z, the song with which they open most of their concerts and the only song from their 2021 EP Mayday NOT to have an official video. Their YouTube channel also contains a considerable number of clips from the 24 live shows they headlined in the 40 days prior to their stop in Phoenix.
If you spend a half hour listening to their studio material -- then at least another 15 minutes on their live material (I recommend this clip from the famed Troubadour in Los Angeles earlier in May -- I dare you to tell me that you don't hear what I hear.
Perhaps no better endorsement of the band comes from the late Taylor Hawkins, given backstage when The Warning opened for Foo Fighters in Mexico City 10 days before the beloved drummer passed away.
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I've been a huge fan of rock roughly since late summer of 1980. I come from a place too rural and remote to have had a rock radio station available to me on either radio dial as I started 7th grade that August. Early that school year, one of my classmates was being dropped off at junior high by his high school senior brother. What was coming out of the cassette deck of the stereo of his refurbished late-60's Mustang? Side 2 of AC/DC's one-month-new album Back In Black.
How could I NOT get hooked?!? It was loud and badass and infused with the dark backstory of their late lead singer Bon Scott's untimely and mysterious death. It intrigued me and a substantial number of boys my age on at least 3 continents... and has kept intriguing fans through the years to make it the world's best-selling album of original music by any artist not named Michael Jackson.
The world we live in today, empirically, does not find rock to be intriguing.
One friend of the aforementioned David Bendeth is rock jack-of-all-trades Rick Beato, whose main YouTube channel has almost 3-million subscribers. Beato hosted a half-hour livestream this past winter entitled "Will Rock Music Ever Come Back?"
The very-credible title in and of itself indicates rock has seen better days. In the video, he shows a graphic of a year's worth of Google searches by music genre. Rock gets half the search traffic of country and only one-fourth of the traffic of hip hop. Beato cites a musicbusinessworldwide.com article indicating barely more than one fourth of all music consumed in the US is new releases.
Beato doesn't really go about answering the question as much as he does illustrating the reality in which rock finds itself in 2022 -- the reality as expressed by the consensus of many music-business friends he met on a recent trip to New York.
Among the items of consensus:
- The most newly-created really big rock & roll rock star (i.e. Beato would call Billie Eilish a rock star, and I would call Lin Manuel Miranda a rock star; neither are rock & roll rock stars) is Dave Grohl, who was born in 1969.
- There are no stars (for young people) to imitate. Dave Grohl may be a rock star, but not many teens want to emulate him. Young people of today don't see themselves in him.
- Young people don't want to learn instruments.
- All forms of music are competing for the attention of young people with video games.
This video came out before Taylor Hawkins passed away. So, not only is the world's newest rock star and current rock standard bearer in his early 50s, Dave Grohl's band, for the most understandable reason in the world, is inactive at the time of this writing.
So in the absence of a Rick Beato answer to that question, I will attempt to offer one in the context of the consensus items I described above.
My answer: rock will rise or fall based upon how well young people (in the USA and elsewhere) see themselves and their experiences reflected in the work of current and emerging rock bands which will need to reach those young people in the ways that they consume media.
Rock and roll is floundering, in part, because it's not nearly as diverse as other modern music genres. The makers of rock are, relative to country, pop, and hip hop, a boys club. Rock's audience is heavily white, heavily anglophone, and aging.
For rock to thrive again, it needs to appeal to women, minorities, people born in or shortly before the 21st Century, and people who may not speak English (or only speak English part-time). As The Warning itself is all of those things, the band uniquely is positioned to make inroads here. Pau's lyrics are the angst of her generation -- including how greed and unchecked power damage the world she and her peers soon will inherit from folks like me.
Forty years ago in March 1982, the album Beauty And The Beat by The Go-Go's became the first album to hit #1 on the US Billboard Hot 200 album chart where all of the music was written and performed by women. Do you know what the second such album was? Trick question; it hasn't happened yet. It's not fair to put the blame for that on the Go-Go's... but it's fair to say the Go-Go's didn't have any meaningful coattails. I turned 14 while their album was #1, I don't remember girls my age telling me "I want to be like Belinda Carlisle or Jane Wiedlin."
The Warning might have some coattails. While most of the venues of The Warning's recent tour were bars, there were a lot of all ages shows during this tour. While the typical member of the crowd was a man roughly my age, several of those men brought teen and pre-teen daughters... and a number of those say they've have been inspired to learn instruments and sing (and, judging by my own children, teen girls are a bit less enamored with video games than their male peers).
When Nirvana put Dave Grohl on the journey to becoming a rock star, the path to stardom in his genre had been stable for awhile: get as much play as possible on what was then known as album-rock radio and on MTV (a plurality of its programming in 1991 still was music videos). That's not where young people get their music today and it's definitely not where they encounter and sample music of artists they haven't encountered before. The Warning, its members, and its management certainly are social-media savvy and are working it to cultivate a connection to fans and prospective fans.
The task ahead for rock to remain a relevant and vibrant art form, especially as the world's remaining rock stars age or move on from this life, might be captured in this verse and chorus from a track off of The Warning's latest EP:
Dry my tears cause I’m a weapon.
Weapons never weep.
I’m not in danger.
It’s the one to beat.
I’m not in danger.
I’m the danger now.
More than just a vessel in disguise.
Pain is the price to survive
The world of rock will need to be bold, and promptly, to change in ways to assure the genre's future.
It's a future The Warning definitely is ready to become a key part of.
