The Dead Male Rock Star

I never got to live in John Lennon's world. He died within a year of my birth. Our two souls never shared this forsaken earth, but I feel like I know him. And that's because of the little pieces of himself he left behind, burned on pearlescent discs and packaged in plastic jewel cases.

There's something intriguing about dead male rock stars. You'll never again get to see them in concert, or on Late Night with David Letterman. A mythical shroud envelops them, so you almost believe they were never real, just a figment of yours and every Rolling Stone critic's imaginations.

But those CDs assure me they were here. Linking the gap between the other-worldly realm where dead rock gods reside and the all-too real world where we faithfully worship them.

Bob Marley. Jeff Buckley. John Lennon. Kurt Cobain. Many others like them were cut down prematurely, evoking the painful thoughts of what might have been.

But all we know is what was.

I find myself piercing the muted stares of dead rock stars from their CD jackets. Falling into their magnetic pupils and tripping on their exquisite pain, swimming through their lonely soundscapes and climbing up their mysteries. And from my dimly lit room, they showed me the world ... without holding my hand, without buying a plane ticket, and without being alive.

All the while, their tortured bodies that bore the brunt of all their inner earthquakes seemed all the more beautiful.

And that is the trick of a dead male rock star, or any artist guy, living or not. He'll keep his darkness bottled inside his gorgeous god-given body - and sometimes that darkness, that pain, that sorrow, those things that gods like them shouldn't have to endure, are distilled into drops of art.

The sadest thing about the dead male rock star though, to perpetuate a metaphor, is that the faucet has been turned off, and all you're left with is standing water.