IN APRIL, Greg Graffin, a professor in the UCLA living sciences department, arrived on the campus of Harvard University to accept an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, an honor that had bypast to Salman Rushdie the previous year. The studious-looking Graffin stood at a podium and delivered a thoughtful lecture on the history of humanism and its meaning in his life. It was, he says, one of the highlights of his pedantic career.
Weeks later, Graffin is in Irvine addressing a very different kind of audience. He stands in front of 20,000 rock fans at a concert known rather fittingly as the Weenie Roast. It is nearly hundred degrees, and Graffin is pacing endorse and forth as the members of his longstanding punk ring, Bad Religion, play behind him at breakneck swiftness. He raises the mike and sings to the crowd: "If there's a purpose for us all / it remains a secret to me / don't ask me to justify my life." As he does, thousands of young fans, many of them wear Bad Religion shirts, sing along. The band leaves the leg to deafening applause.
Graffin signs autographs, so retreats into an air-conditioned trailer. Asked what it feels like to have such a passionate following, he seems unfazed. "If you don't have adept self-awareness, organism in a successful stripe will really screw you up," Graffin says. "I don't have any mastery what people think about me. And I realise that they don't in truth know me. What you saw out there were thousands of totally different experiences. But my end has constantly been to elevate the art form. If a fan tells me they did a term paper on organic evolution because of one of my songs, it's selfsame touching."
There's a feeling that rock candy musicians wHO have tasted even the smallest amount of success will, like the proverbial high school quarterback, pass their left days longing for past glories and lamenting what might have been. It can be nearly impossible to replicate the benjamin Rush of playacting in presence of a rapturous herd, and anything like normality can appear a devastating comedown.
So they cling. Scan the music listings on any hebdomad and you'll find reunification shows, many for bands that hardly warranted attention even in their prime. Retread, not reinvention, is too often the formula. But in that respect are, of course, some notable exceptions.
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers, managed to parlay an interest in recording engineering into a career as one of the nation's leading counterterrorism experts. Queen guitarist Brian May returned to school, received a PhD in physics, contributed to a book on the big bang theory and was of late appointed chancellor of a university. Alannah Currie, the geometrically coifed singer of new wave ensemble the Thompson Twins, is now an creative person who, among other things, designs piece of furniture made from roadkill. Jethro Tull singer and flautist Ian Anderson now runs a consortium of successful salmon farms.
It's an odd assortment of pursuits entirely uniform with the individualistic spirit of the music -- and proof that, for those willing to look forward, lifespan after stone needn't be an inevitable descent into drudgery and stagnation.
Sometimes, what's required is a rekindling of interests held earlier music careers took off.
At a coffee house skinny the UCLA campus where he teaches, Graffin explains how hebecame interested in evolutionary biological science as a high school punk rocker in the San Fernando Valley. "I had expectant questions approximately where we come from. The things that religion usually satisfies, I was learning from science. The band had started deuce years earlier that, and it was really a good synergism because we were talk about Bad Religion, and it's unquestioning in evolution that at that place are no gods."
On one of Bad Religion's earliest recordings, a teenaged Graffin reveals that fascination with organic evolution: "Early gentleman walked away, as advanced man took control, their minds weren't all the same, to conquer was his braggart goal. So he built his gravid empire and slaughtered his own kind. Then he died a confused serviceman, killed himself with his own mind."
Graffin says he fully expected to go after an academic career with the band remaining as a rocking horse. But in the early '90s, Bad Religion recorded an album called "Suffer," which nigh single-handedly enkindled a hoodlum rock revitalization. Suddenly the band's audience was growing and its records selling more than ever. In response, Graffin put his academic pursuits on hold and concentrated on his music career.
Since then, the band has had a number of radio hits and maintains a prominent international following. Amid all this, Graffin eventually earned a PhD from Cornell University and became tenured at UCLA. He now divides his year betwixt teaching and playing with Bad Religion.
"I actually think it's made us a far more interesting band," he says. "And I consider it's possible that if I hadn't maintained my academic pursuits, the band would have burned out earlier. But in terms of satisfaction, there's no difference to me between lecturing and performing. It's all entertainment. You're just trying to inspire people."
For his next trick . . .
TO FIND Dave Lovering, drummer for the Pixies, at his new job, one first arrives at a large Victorian perched supra the lights of Hollywood. You walk through a hidden door in a bookcase, tortuous up in an flowery bar filled with people in formal dress. Then it's a roundabout route to another stairway that descends into what appears to be the basement. Lovering is there waiting in a dark suit and a tie. His hair is closely cropped, his beard full. His co-worker, Rob Zabrecky, stands next to him, pale and cadaverous, wearing a similarly dark suit. The two introduce themselves, then disappear.
The room fills with people, most carrying cocktails. Soon a dissonant song plays and Lovering and Zabrecky re-emerge on a small level along with a third base man called Fitzgerald. For the succeeding 30 minutes, they do a blend of delusion, dark funniness and something resembling performance art. At one point, Lovering straps a winking antenna to his head and identifies playing card game concealed by audience members until his head begins to smoke. The act, called the Unholy Three, has been performing in the basement of the Magic Castle every week now for nearly fivesome years.
Upstairs all over dinner, Lovering says that, like Graffin, he never intended to have a career in music. He had calibrated college with a level in technology, and a subsequent job building lasers was fitful by the band's unexpected success. When the Pixies disbanded in 1993, he moved to Los Angeles. It was here that the longtime science buff and practical joker was introduced to magic by local musician Grant-Lee Phillips, who took him along to a local magic convention. "I saw stuff and nonsense there that just completely blew me away," Lovering says. "There was one particular card trick that I just couldn't catch over. I had to learn how to do it."
Around that same time, his cohort Zabrecky was in New York recording the third and final record album for his alternative pop up band Possum Dixon. Far from existence distraught over the group's impending demise, Zabreckey says he knew exactly what direction his new career would go. In fact, during that last recording session, producer Ric Ocasek had to remind Zabrecky that they were there to finish an album, not perfect his illusion tricks.
Back in Los Angeles, Lovering and Zabrecky were introduced by mutual friend Phillips. The two auditioned for and became members of the Magic Castle, and since then they get spent most of their nights making friends with, and learning from, the veteran magicians who usage the place as an unofficial clubhouse. "We arrived here as total outsiders," Zabrecky says. "We came from the rock world, which was really different than most magicians. It's sort of like if two old magicians of a sudden formed a rock
