So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star

The Byrds So You Want to be a Rock and Roll Star:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prxkTbekrMQ

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts

Nancy Wilson of Heart

 So, you want to be a Rock and Roll Star. It all sounds breathlessly and endlessly exciting in the Byrds song. Such an easy goal: one, to play Rock and Roll music and two, to be a star. It's not as if anyone would object to being star, with all that being a star entails. But... hmmm. How do you go about becoming a rock star, anyway? It's not like they offer classes in high school on how to dye your hair to just the right Indie shade of lavender, or how to dress with the just the right amount of reckless flair. I mean, you can take a Home Economics class and learn how to make Mac N' Cheese, or you can take a Wood Shop class and learn how to build a bookshelf. You can perhaps take Music classes, if you're lucky and budget cuts at your local high school haven't reduced the Music Department to next to naught. The question being- can you even learn how to play guitar like The Byrds during the course of a high school Music class?

 

Fleetwood Mac

 

How do you go about becoming a Rock and Roll Star?

Of course, The Byrds spelled it out fairly clearly. Buy an electric guitar, check. Learn how to play, check. Comb your hair just right, check, and buy a tight pair of pants, check. Sell your soul to an agent, check. Get a hit song and the girls will tear you apart. Checkmate. What teenaged boy wouldn't dream of being torn apart by a throng of drooling girls, especially those of the cheerleader variety, who normally might not look in his direction.



The Pretenders



But what if, on the other hand, you are a girl who listened to that The Byrds song? What if you were a girl who decided to rock? Who did you look up to as an example of the perfect Rock Front Woman? Well, if you were a girl growing up in the 50s or 60s, or even in the early 70s, you were quite clearly out of luck. Because women rockers were few and far between, if such an animal existed at all during the 50s and 60s. Maybe Patti Smith or Stevie Nicks could be a role model during the early 70s, but  really, they did not play an electric guitar. Grace Slick wrote classic songs during the 60s, but she also did not play the guitar. In the late 70s, though, a whole new breed of rockers appeared, women rockers. Women like Nancy Wilson, Chrissie Hynde, Joan Jett, Lita Ford, and even Bonnie Raitt appeared on the scene. They broke the mould of girls who looked pretty and sang their hearts out, like the Supremes or even Pat Benatar. These women wrote their own songs, played their own guitars, and fronted their own band. They took over the jobs usually reserved for men in music- they could curse like a man, party like a man, and get up onstage and rock like a man.

   Some of my favorite front women found success in England, where the Punk movement had made being a woman something of an asset, or maybe it is more correct to say that being a woman was not a drawback. The London rock scene was more gender-neutral than ever before. A guitarist was a guitarist was a guitarist, regarless of chromozonal arrangements. You weren't so much judged on your gender, but perhaps more on your visual presentation. Hell, Sid Vicious couldn't even play his guitar, let alone sing, so what did it matter if you were a woman who could actually figure out what chords to play without a diagram taped to the back of your instrument?
And so we have iconic rock front woman like Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders, who found success in England with a trio of three talented English musicians. Or Katrina Leskanich, of Katrina and the Waves, who also found success in London backed by three British musicians. Even Jett worked for a time in London, until she found greater success with the LA-based Blackhearts. Maybe the Byrds should have added a line to their song 'So you want to be a Rock and Roll Star'. Maybe they should have thrown something in for the girls who wanted to rock, if they could even have imagined  a female guitarist at the time. Just a small hint, for the ladies, so to speak- pack it up, girls, hop on the next plane to England, and yes, maybe you can meet your agent in London and be a star.
 

 

      

Katrina and the Waves