Last week, the noxious Barack Obama wheeled out crusty rocker Bruce Springsteen to help celebrate the opening of his library, an appropriately awful building that looks like a concrete fungus or a brutalist tribute to Peyronie’s disease. The Boss has been at it for nearly a half century and looks it, with that kind of elderly facial tightness you get from a dowager on her seventh facelift. He reminds one of those human-skin warning signs staked out to scare mute humans away from the forbidden zone in the original Planet of the Apes. Appropriately, you probably don’t like Bruce Springsteen unless you were around to watch Charlton Heston on the big screen.

And that brings up the subject of today’s column – whatever happened to rock? I don’t mean rock ‘n’ roll in the sense of Chuck Berry or the like. I mean the kind of masculine guitar-based music that people of our generation – most of us late boomers to Gen Xers – grew up listening to back in an era when the local station would unironically announce the 10th month was “Rocktober” and throw down a super set of Guns N’ Roses.

Oh yeah, those were the days. Now, those of us who rock are not all the same. There are various species of rock. Among the sects are the heavy metal guys, the classic rock guys, and the guys like me, alternative rock guys who grew up in Southern California listening to KROQ, 91X, or San Francisco’s legendary The Quake. The last station is what changed me – I was parking cars for Dollar Rent-A-Car at SFO, and every once in a while, you’d catch one with an FM radio. At the time, I was treading water in a miasma of ponderous blah rock. I mean Def Leppard, Pink Floyd, that sort of thing. Yeah, I know they have their charms, but they weren’t doing much for me. So when I got lucky enough to get a car with an FM radio, I’d search around, and I........

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