'Behind the Music': spooky moral netherworld

Everything the commercial says is true. VH1's Behind the Music is so addictive it should come with a warning from the Surgeon General. It is able to make Tony Orlando seem interesting. I should know. Over the summer I myself became addicted to the series, each an hour-long episode that delivers a probing and emotionally-wrenching "rockumentary" of a great rock 'n' roller. Sadly, the whole experience has left me feeling like a sucker.

My addiction to Behind the Music seemed innocuous enough at first. I even considered it something to be cultivated. After all, the "rockumentary" genre had never been remotely this high-quality before. Suddenly, goofy rock profiles began looking like high art. In the process of telling their stories, the program's subjects are dragged through the mud, recounting their moments of dizziest excess, denouncing records made from an artistic morass, and generally delivering way more honesty than we're used to hearing from our icons. The treacherous tales are complemented by great old footage, often showing the protagonist in a compromising glittery costume at a high-school talent show or involved in some other circumstance that helps explode the pop-star myth. Many weeks passed when I considered myself proud to cheer on a program that entertained and informed with BTM's panache.

Sometime in the middle of the Tom Petty special, however, I began to feel as if the station might be having me for lunch. "When we come back," announced my narrator's trusty and scandal-worn voice, "Tom Petty hits the wall. Literally." When the program resumed, Tom's friends and bandmates tearfully recalled that fateful day when the rocker threw such a temper tantrum that he really did punch a wall. How very devastating that must have been.

In the addiction-treatment biz, we call the addict's lowest point-the point at which he either gives up or begins his ascent into sobriety-"rock bottom." Behind the Music craves rock bottoms. And if its protagonists can't deliver an honest-to-goodness rock bottom, like a drug overdose or a really horrendous album, the program will go to any lengths to invent one. It sells us the same sinner-to-saved narrative every time. BTM does not document the lives and times of rock heroes; it documents 12-step recov-ery processes.

Pop stars selected for the BTM treatment invariably come to us as penitents. One after another, they stare down the camera eye and tell us that their pasts were very, very wild, that they did some very, very serious drugs, that they were very, very unfaithful to their wives and, by extension, to their three-year-old sons from whom they are now estranged, and that (and this is the important part) they will never, ever go down that dark and lonesome road again. Because the pain is too severe. So dear viewer, they tell us, please do not make the same mistakes we did.

Besides the obvious and odious Nixonian moralizing that BTM's salvation stories invoke, the program is just plain anti-rock-'n'-roll. Because in the hallowed and amoral world of real rock music, rock bottom is hardly the point from which the protagonist seeks a quick exit. Rather, rock bottom is the wreckage from which he most likely churns out a classic album or two. A quick trek through rock history confirms this. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are photographed proudly clutching matching bourbon bottles and harmonizing on the inside sleeve of Exile on Main Street. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper LP is clearly a case of great musicians taking a brisk walk with some serious hallucinogens. Another Side of Bob Dylan, a casual little masterpiece recorded in a single night, was reputedly made under the influence of some pretty stiff wine.

The rock 'n' roll correlation between one's peak in musical achievement and one's "rock bottom" in addiction-speak is not accidental. Great rock always comes across as a missive from an emotional precipice. It's dangerous, risky, exciting. And there's always the chance that our hero may be living at such a fevered pitch that he won't come back alive (see Hendrix, Morrison ad nauseum).

Behind the Music tells us that it's hunky-dory to air out the fully sordid tales of one's excesses with sex, drugs, booze or heck, even wall-punching-as long as those tales are safely in the past, and as long as the present-day subject is happy as a clam and healthy as a horse. Thrill us, shock us, and then tell us you were all wrong. In denying the circumstances that create great music, one denies the music as well. VH1 cannot have it both ways.

Actually, as part of a massive media octopus, it can probably have it both ways whenever it wants. But the charade is over as far as I'm concerned. Behind the Music, while still the most entertaining program on television, is nevertheless about as rock 'n' roll as apple juice.

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