I am going to my first music festival in 20 years. There’s a lot of irony and symbolism in that statement. The last one I went to was the Stoner Hands of Doom Festival in September of 2004 in Youngstown, Ohio. The festival was held in a wonderfully amazing dive bar on the dive site of town. The bar was The Nyabinghi. It is in that bar that my life was irreversibly changed.
This September, I am going to RippleFest in Austin, Texas. I will be covering the event for MetalTalk with my trusted spirit/photographer, Melanie Webster. What happened to me in 2004 is going to happen to her in 2024. That’s because it’s a festival that covers the same genre of stoner and doom.
In 2024, this scene isn’t hanging on. It’s grown so much and so fast, that it was the prime motivation for me to start writing my music book in 2021. RippleFest will be the official book launch for Sonic Seducer.
And so just recently, I had a long and energetic conversation with Todd Severin, an ophthalmic surgeon in California. I am a math consultant, and we’re both baby boomers. Our one hour conversation spent about two minutes on all that. The rest of the time was talking about the robust health of rock music with childlike giddiness.
One of the worst falsehoods that actively circulates in our culture–especially among our age group–is that rock music is dead. Not only is there zero truth to that, but the current health of rock music is just as ripe with creativity and underground might as the golden age of rock music of the late ’60s to the early ’70s.
Oh, I purposely left out one important detail about Severein–he started the music label called Ripple-music 15 years ago. And Ryan Garney, soul screamer for the killer band High Desert Queen, is the curator of RippleFest and an elder(another one) of the scene.
Severein sold a good chunk of his valuable comic book collection to get it all going. Today there are over 60 bands on his label. Chances are most people outside the radius of heavy music have not heard any of them–especially the ones not from North America. Wo Fat, a band out of Texas, is somebody I would rather see than have front-row tickets to The Rolling Stones. I am a massive Stones fan and still enthusiastically play albums like Exile on Main Street and Sticky Fingers. I just have zero interest in using any of my time to listen to, see, and financially support bands I grew up with in high school.
Severin and his label are doing well. What that means in terms of dollars is that he is breaking even. Promoting the current stoner/doom scene is a passion project. Same with me. I have written three successful books on mathematics. Sonic Seducer is far more a labor of love. And, I have discussed with Severein ways of earmarking a percentage of the profits to start a fund to help current and new bands on the scene. Few of these bands have managers. Almost all the bands rely on sales of merchandise at shows to simply keep going. There are no allusions to being commercially big. They are also in it for the love of the music. Almost all my favourite new music comes from here.
The current stoner/desert scene is the biggest music scene in the entire world. There are literally hundreds of great bands that span more and more countries. When I was growing up, all the bands came from either North America or the UK. Not only do the bands come from other countries like Sweden, Netherlands, Italy, Greece, France, Poland, Switzerland, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and Japan, but there are countless festivals geared to this kind of music all over Europe and North America.
The reasons you have not heard of any of this is because current rock music critics are constipated in their thinking, and need to sell the idea that rock music is dead to make themselves look smart and profitable.
There’s tons of money in nostalgia. Anyone my age can convincingly opine to a buying audience that the generation of classic rock was not only the best ever, but also the last stop for quality music. This is gatekeeping 101.
Popular writers, magazines, and large record labels are not interested in new rock music, which isn’t going to be a commercial success right away.
What’s ironic is that this kind of thinking was not part of the embryonic movement of rock music in the Wild West period between 1968 and 1972.
These same folks who celebrated something like being in the ‘Age Of Bowie, now dismiss the possibility of underground creativity fermenting anywhere in rock music. That’s because they are all paid-off ostriches, with their heads in the sand of monetizing Dad rock music. I’m a proud dad. Probably older than most of these music critics. You can finish the irony of these statements in your head.
Of course they are all wrong. The current rock music scene is absolutely on fire all over the world. Today, not yesterday, is my favourite time ever to listen to music. I have never felt so alive and nourished with rock music.
I am more youthful today than I have ever been in any part of my life. Being incurious to finding the edges of heavy rock music is the bloody antithesis of what attracted you to rock and roll in the first place.
Rock music isn’t dead. Our original values and reason for loving it are.
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New Rock Music Helped Being Kept Alive By Sexegenerians first appeared on
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