I WAS SURPRISED TO READ in the newspaper the other day that the movie star Russell Crowe has just concluded a month-long tour with his rock ’n’ roll band, a group of Australians called “30 Odd Foot of Grunts.” I was surprised for reasons that had nothing to do with the stupid name. I didn’t know Russell Crowe was on tour, for one thing; and I didn’t know Russell Crowe had a band. I wouldn’t have thought it necessary for him to have a band. By any objective standard, he is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence. He earns more money in a month than you or I will earn in a lifetime, and he has likely banked more than he could ever spend. He enjoys the adulation of millions of strangers, the respect of his peers, and the awed deference of the creepy movie moguls who would technically be considered his bosses if they weren’t so afraid of ticking him off. He has, in short, satisfied all the ambitions that might vex a normal fellow in twenty-first century America. Cars, houses, boats, power tools—he has everything a man could want. He has Meg Ryan’s phone number. He has everything, apparently, but the essential thing: He isn’t a rock star. Clearly this is a source of some annoyance for him, as it is for most men. Crowe’s aspiration—along with that of other matinee idols with vanity bands, such as Bruce Willis and Keanu Reeves and Dennis Quaid and many others—reflects the general consensus among men that being a rock star is more than a job, more than a career, more indeed than a way of life. Being a rock star is the summit of cool, a kind of apotheosis, the proper end and final cause, in Aristotelian terms, of masculinity. (Aristotle used to play bass for the Funkadelics.) Movie stars routinely strive to be rock stars, you’ll notice, but it seldom works the other way round. Rock stars don’t want the demotion. The rock ’n’ roll ambition settles in early. As a contagion it moves from teen to teen, erupting first in that auspicious moment when, in the privacy of his bedroom with the stereo blaring, the youngster feels his fingers twitch over the imaginary fretboard of an air guitar. It continues, for some of us, into late adolescence and beyond, often culminating in garage bands that terrorize the neighborhood cats with calamitous cover versions of “Johnny B. Goode” or (more recently) “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And in many cases—maybe most cases—it never goes into remission. The next time you’re at a stop light, cast a glance at the car next to you. That guy in the Camry with the baby seat in back may look like he’s singing along to the radio. But in the private precincts of his heart he’s really Jim Morrison, before Jim got all puffy and moved to Paris and fell face first in the bath. In our dreams we are all rockers in their prime. For the average baby-boomer schlub, the durability of the dream is easy to explain. Sex is at the heart of the matter, as it usually is. A rock star in Almost Famous, last year’s rose-tinted movie about 1970s rock, pompously tells an interviewer why he pursues his art: “It’s a voice inside you, man, and it says, ‘Here I am and f— you if you can’t understand me!’” After a pause he adds: “Plus the chicks are great.” Making the obvious seem as obscure as possible, as they so often do, evolutionary psychologists have even conducted studies proving—to quote one textbook—that “most pop music is produced by men aged between 20 and 40, the very age when they are investing heavily in mating efforts.” What an evolutionary psychologist can’t explain, though, is the particular men who have enjoyed all these mating opportunities. From Buddy Holly to Charlie Watts, Ringo to Barry White—this is a line-up of unlikely sex objects. The alchemy of rock stardom performs miracles. It even transformed Rod Stewart into an object of desire. There really is a rock ’n’ roll heaven. But still: How to account for the ambition of Russell Crowe and Bruce Willis and their colleagues in movie stardom, for whom, demonstrably, the “chicks” are already “great”? I did some digging and found, on his band’s website, the lyrics to many of Crowe’s songs, and reading them I saw the explanation. He says he has a “hunger for self-expression,” ventilated in lyrics like these to his “High Horse Honey”: “You can’t live your life on the fact you’re pretty / Hold it up like you’re head of the class / Cause the good lord above who parted the waters / Will soon start spreading your ass / All over the couch.” Some truths, beyond the reach of the filmic art, can only be approached in song.
