Rock and roll is a teenagers game and everything about rock and roll that isn't a teenagers game is off center. To put it another way, teenagers are to rock and roll. what the story of Jesus is to the Gospels, everything else is to rock and roll what Parables are to the Gospel. They illuminate but they aren't the point.
This comes to mind because of the death Monday of Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs, an English rock band of the 1960s, who were like the big boys, the Stones and the Kinks, the Who, but with roots deeper in the teenage world they were a part (or nearly a part of!). With songs like "Wild Thing" and "I Can't control Myself" the Troggs were scruffy, sex crazed cool jerk teenage kickers, wailing in frustration and desire. A great rock and roll band.
In and out of fashion, whenever Reg felt he could reform the Troggs and urge they could bring their audience back to not innocence but a loss of self in the sweat and heat of rock and roll, a world where the consequences were moot, where life stretched out in a whirl of want and loss and a youthful hormone surge. The sweet thing that is rock and roll and that we, if we don't on some level let kids have at it, we lose whatever it was that made the 1960s a youth fetish.
Today, the fragmented (to put it mildly) world of pop music, makes movement impossible and the graying, and dying, of 1960s icons makes it history. But rock isn't archeology and because it is a gift of self-expression to teenagers, it must live on for them.
Reg Presley understood all this stuff and played it out as loud, white garage rock. A harbinger of punk, indeed an early version of punk, that just couldn't control itself even if Strummer preached of complete control.