Rock Star Hair

This week, I went to see my friend Andy's band. I suppose it's more folk music than it is "rock and roll"--there's a lot of guitar and banjo and no drum--but nevertheless, I think of it as a rock band of sorts because it's contemporary and because Andy is a huge Bob Dylan fan, who while a folkster is also a rockster.

And yet, rock it may not be based on this one thing: the hair. The band does not have rock star hair.

Why is it that rock musicians by and large seem to attract the excesses of haircuts? Andy and his cronies where "normal" hair, business cuts that are good for day jobs. Rocksters, however, usually have hair to the extreme. It is long or it is nonexistent. It is purple or blue or a bright unnatural blond or some combination thereof with a little black mixed in. It is long sideburns, mutton chops. It is long mustaches and crazy beards.

I look at the BeeGees Greatest Hits album I recently purchased--photos from each era of the group. I think of them as seventies disco, but they stretch back to sixties and a Beatles-like sound and on into the nineties. In each photo, there is hair. It is long. It is rock star. It gets longer with the seventies. And then, the contemporary photo. At least one of them still has the shoulder-length freeflowing mass, but a couple of the others have cut down to something more manageable. Still, these aren't our business on Monday sort of cuts. These are cool-guy Sting cuts. These are tough-guy/bald-guy Michael Stipe cuts. These are rock stars, even if they'd never written a song.