The Editorial We
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It was an uncommonly cold and rainy summer evening in 1953 when a young man walked into a barber shop in Memphis Tennessee with a beat-up guitar and a song in his heart. He stood at the threshold as the rain sheeted in sideways, the cold wind a harbinger of Autumn’s chill…of something big just around the corner. He squinted into the darkness, his eyes trained on a man sitting behind a desk, waiting. The man in the door lifted his guitar, pressed two fingers to the fret-board and strummed. The man in the dark wept; it was like nothing he had ever heard before. He trembled in fear as the young man laid down his guitar and said “let’s invent a little something I like to call The Rock and Roll.”

That young man standing at the threshold went by the name Elvis Aaron Presley. As for the man waiting in the dark, that was no barber…that was you and me.

It is no coincidence—and the better history books will point this out—that since that blustery Memphis day there have been no new World Wars, that polio has been all but wiped from the planet, that a man has walked on the moon. And it is no mistake that man was decked out in a shiny white suit, and that when he descended the ladder he gave his hips a little shake and said to the world below “Here I am, rock you like a hurricane!”

But the Legend of Rock has since burned out and faded away, leaving only a shadowy corporate force of tuneless middle-managers. It was they who concocted the conflict in Vietnam in order to boost the sales of anti-war rock anthems to the clamoring masses of peace-loving concert goers who wished for nothing more than to stand in wet fields and mud puddles and listen to longer, more tedious “live versions” of classic rock standards before the musicians could sneak back to their respective hotel rooms to croak.

It was they who convinced the punks to trade in the guitars they couldn’t play very well for keyboards they couldn’t play very well, and to gently flatten their mohawks to lay to one side. The former punks turned new-wavers now looked inward for inspiration; and finding nothing, they consented to playing in back up bands for the Disco Divas the had shunned in their lean years. And the middle managers feasted on the cavernous carcass that was the Rock and Roll Dream.

Then came the 90s…and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj5VEw6bZPY

Needless to say, America needs a new hero; and that hero is The Editorial We.