Rock’n’Roll Heroes, by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Text by Carolyn Lee Boyd, 1981
Introduction and photos by Robert Barry Francos, 2010
© FFanzeen
Images from the Internet

The following commentary was written for FFanzeen No. 7 in 1981, by Carolyn Lee Boyd, a then-New York-based poet.

Everyone in rock’n’roll is really somebody else. The one, and possibly only, requirement for being a rock’n’roller (as opposed to being a plumber or Krishna person, or a psychotic) is to have the ability (need) to digest the obsessions of another soul, to immortalize mortality, and to forsake all others for a great unknown made greater by anonymity. Rock’n’roll isn’t an art, it isn’t youth culture, it isn’t earth’s answer to UFOs – it is the search for the world’s greatest rock’n’roll hero.
We are a generation raised by creations of the media, with an occasional human popping through. Keith Richards, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Jim Morrison all orphaned me at an early age (though still too late). The Family perpetuates itself – heroes feeding off heroes creating heroes, and over and on. Once you are caught in the circle, you can never really leave. It is a gift and a curse.
Hero worship is what makes rock’n’roll unique form disco or jazz or classical (or plumbing or shaved heads or a psychiatric ward). It is our divinity. A button or a t-shirt or a picture on the wall captures a piece of holiness, and if the hero falls, the deity still lives on and we are sure of our worth and our lives are still superior to everyone else’s.
Hero worship opens our eyes and closes our eyes. It makes us divide the world into rock’n’roll and not rock’n’roll. It is a screaming red highway into the pits of Dracula and Ecclesiastes. We have all the giant images of history – virgin whores, suicidal netherworldly poets, frogs turned into princes turned frogs, depraved deteriorated dementos. Rock’n’roll brings them down to earth and raises and lowers us to their level.
Rock’n’roll heroes are for people who want more than other people who will / must give up everything for it. Dead rock’n’roll heroes show us the afterlife (we all have our secret guardian dead rock’n’roll star); the live ones guide us, teach us, accept our sacrifices of love and hate, present us with everything we could want on a wax platter. We are not afraid to look anything in the face, though frequently too bored.
It doesn’t take a lot of be a rock’n’roll hero. Being a childhood musical prodigy helps (and we seem to have more than our share of them, possibly because we all are convinced we are one). Most rock’n’roll stars are pretty average when you get right down to it. All that is really necessary is that a lot of people believe you are a rock’n’roll star. The first step is to believe yourself in and act accordingly, however that may be.
The greatest rock’n’roll heroes – the ones that last forever, the ones that are even when they are not, the ones that would be heroes in whatever time and place they were born – are us. Not us, but the ones who have been to the top and the bottom and know there is no difference. Not because rock’n’roll is the great leveler or the music of the people and all that, but they are the ones we cannibalize to create ourselves. If there is a God, they are our cosmic recompense for being born into a world where we need them so badly.