“Why idolize dead rock stars.” I felt a bit like an alien typing my search query into Google … as if I had been suddenly dropped onto Earth and tapped into something that I could tell was vital to the earthling’s social psyche, but was at a loss for words to articulate what it could be. Although I can wrap my extraterrestrial brain around the intricacies of a Google search, American pop culture is a snarling, untamed beast, much larger and more powerful than the sum total of people it feeds off. Its mind, if you could call it a mind, is a squirming mass, half-fried by a world indebted to microwave radiation, and propelled by the two-fold thrust of the muscle memory of a decaying nervous system, and roving, universal chaos. It’s maddening enough attempting to confront pop culture as a human living in the midst of it all.

But returning to my initial question: Why do we idolize dead rock stars?

My journey starts with the Doors. It was likely by chance that I landed on the psychedelic band known for ravaging the Sunset Strip. It could easily have been the Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or had I younger parents it could have been Metallica and Slayer, because 2006 was this baffling year when classic rock was “in,” and a trendy teen could claim some street cred by rifling through her parents’ album collection and then by delivering the good news to her sophomore classmates. The Doors just happened to be what I found first.

Maybe that’s not entirely true.

In 2006, I was 14, and until that time I found the music everyone else was listening to either far too poppy, or way too inaccessible for me in my MTV-blocked household. Though in my prolonged search for cool, stumbling across albums like Dark Side of the Moon, and Beggars Banquet there was no band that struck a chord in me as did the Doors. The group sounded like nothing else I had heard, and there was a distinctive darkness that seem to swarm around the band. And maybe more particularly, the Doors had Jim Morrison. Morrison was unlike the David Gilmours, the Paul McCartneys and Keith Richards of the world. Aside from being incredibly charismatic, devious, and a not-delicate yet poetic soul, Morrison had an exceptional quality that inarguably set him apart from the previous mentioned artists—he was dead.

Long dead. Dead over 20 years before I was even born. This, I think, is significant.

Perhaps, this is one of the reasons, if not the only reason, why we remember the Doors, and forget Status Quo, or why we don’t quite push the Kinks to the same upper echelons of rock “god”-ness. Consider, for a moment, the fact that “rock god” has even entered the trite, pop-culture lexicon. Or consider the mystical aura that surrounds the “27 Club”–or even more humorously—the vehement passion of the self-elected gatekeepers, trolling blogs and keen to keep the club “pure” (sorry, Amy Winehouse).

The Doors as a band were certainly good, but it’s not even like everything the band put out became a gilded instant-classic. “Hello, I Love You,” and “Twentieth Century Fox” always sneak their way onto compilation albums, but they seem so fabricated for 1967 AM-radio airwaves that they could have come from another singer’s mouth and no one would have noticed. There’s also more than a handful of tried-and-true stinkers. (“Yes, the River Knows” comes to mind. The “mysticated wine” bit makes my stomach churn every time I hear the line.) If we, and by we I mean the most savage of Doors fans, were to take Jim Morrison’s lyrics and imagine they were penned not by this myth-man, but instead by our freshman-year, college roommate majoring in philosophy, I’d take the bet that the words would be much more difficult to swallow.

But, going back, isn’t it funny that a teen growing up in the late 2000s would even have the chance to stumble on a band that had emerged 40 years prior? At 14, however, it’s easy to buy into the deification of Jim Morrison. You can gloss over the too-indulgent lyrics, (or even hail them as genius) because the teenage experience itself is often over-indulgent. Ironically, the existence of the artist’s mortality is what allows us the space for apotheosis. Because a dead rock star can no longer truly have a say in the matter, society is given the space to write a legacy for the star independently of his wishes or current actions. The more elusive the star—and make no mistake, Morrison, was nearly as cryptic in his daily interactions as he was writing lyrics—the easier it is for fans to craft their own narratives, and use the now-pliable image to bend the star toward whatever needs they are looking to fulfill. A residual of our humanness that has allowed us to maintain our histories through stories is that people like narrative arcs.

In high school especially, the age 27 seems far-off, but not void of a relatable youth. There are no comments to alienate the artist from today’s young circles, and there’s nothing quite like Roger Daltrey’s 60+-year-old abs to contend with. And this is why it’s totally cool to scribble “the streets are fields that never die” onto your teal pair of Converse high tops in sharpie as a teenager, because you’re like, that in-tune with his lyricism, man.

On larger scale however, rock even is, as we now know it, dead. And that’s fine. Rock as we knew it has been dead countless times, and critics have been heralding its death since 1968. But aesthetic life is like a comic book author, eager to kill off beloved characters to drum up sales, only to resurrect them through some sort of cheap deus ex machina plot twist. So rock is cyclic, and as far as my lifetime is concerned, rock is eternal. Like our “rock gods,” immortality is achieved only through death.

Though I’m in no way trying to undercut the band, (the Doors still hold a particularly special place in my heart–even if I’m not engaging with their songs as actively as I used to, and if the shrine to Morrison that was in my room has been–mostly–dismantled), Morrison’s greatest legacy may have been death. His death, along with that of Hendrix, Joplin and few others heralded the beginning of a new musical era, and perhaps cemented the Doors as a near-household name.

Is Rock dead?

Just posing the question makes me twitch and I’m starting to break out in sweats thinking about it. At the same time though, artists who seem to genuflect to the “Gods of Rock” end up falling into tired tropes, and it’s natural to consider how many times an idea can be recapitulated and still be revolutionary. Bergo ’45, like many rock groups, is a band that owes a debt to the mainstream music of the late 60’s and 70’s however, its 14-track span feels aimless in scope and fails to either honor the bands or advance the genre.

Their first LP, the ambitiously titled Dresden, falls flat of its lofty name and though there are certain moments in their sound worth exploring, the work is largely a hallmark of a band yet to settle into a coherent approach. The firebombed Dresden image that haunts the album’s cover seems to prime the listener for something vaguely political—perhaps offering an exploration into the atrocities of war, or a meditation on dehumanization—but if there’s a loaded message to be taken from the album, it must be buried somewhere in the unintelligible vocals. The album suffers from severe production issues, often dragging the vocal line to the bottom of the mix, where it is gleefully swallowed up by needless, hefty instrumentals. “Mud in Your Eye,” the album’s opening track, is a good example of this defect with vocals that mimic someone in the final throes of treading water—bobbing up and down, dangerously close to being drowned entirely. The lo-fi quality of the recording could work if the band wallowed in the DIY aesthetic and possessed the defiant snub of high fidelity in the vein of bands like The Vaselines. But the music seems to be too calculated to exist in that space.

Aside from the recording quality, the band suffers from self-congratulatory instrumental sections and frivolous fills that move the music nowhere and that could be cut entirely without consequence. “Wasted Words,” a track clocking in at 10 minutes, could be more aptly titled “Wasted Time” as the two minutes of halfway-decent songwriting is regurgitated ad nauseam. It’s as if the band members need the listener to know how proficient they are on their instruments. Though mindless soloing may be impressive at parties, it is positively grating in the context of an album. The drummer is the most grievous offender, offering completely superfluous fills (in “Mud in Your Eye,” “Sweet Mary”), and, in the case of “It’s Just About Time,” creating winded solos that flirt dangerously with falling behind the beat.

The band’s strongest songs, not surprisingly, are its simplest. “Poignant” and “Fifty-Eight,” slower tracks propelled by solid acoustic strumming, seem to hit their intended mark. Without the weight of the other instruments the vocalist drops his falsetto, and instead adopts a lower register, which sounds far less forced than many of the full-band tracks. “And So It Goes” and “Run It,” though imperfect in arrangement, point toward what could be the sound of a band matured. The tracks—which have an almost Smiths, new-wave vibe—instead of fighting against the singer’s vocal range, not only work with his voice but also feature the few moments when the band exhibits a cohesive sound without any hint of competitiveness. In “Run It” especially, the vocalist is almost unbridled in his rawness, and it is one of the few flashes of sincerity that we hear on the album.
Dresden is the sound of a band that might have potential but fails to fully brandish it here. At its best, the album is inconsistent. There are four or five interesting moments, but they lack development (or worse, suffer from a tedious overdevelopment that beats songs within an inch of their lives), and though I have a hunch that Bergo ’45 produces something dynamic and unique in a live setting, it doesn’t translate on the recording, which is often wearily flat sounding. Dresden fails beyond the sum of its dysfunctional parts—it neglects to create anything meaningful, and seconds of musical daring are quickly substituted for fatigued safe-sounding riffs. Rock may not yet be dead, but rest assured that Bergo ’45 is not doing it any favors.