Guitars and guns are strangely analogous, strings like triggers, notes like bullets, amplifiers the hot steel barrel of a loud report. But can the sounds issued forth by a guitar actually cause one human being to kill another?

There is little doubt that music is a catalyst for both action and change. A greeting card for all occasions, music can be a source of celebration, a call to arms, a gateway to nostalgia, or a soothing comforter.

The martial strains of Queen's 'We Will Rock You' spike our sporting events; Wagnerian marches herald the serious and studious business of the nightly news; the stately and poignant 'Candle In The Wind' or 'Gone Too Soon' accompany the tears at our funerals; 'We've Only Just Begun' underscores the joy of many wedding days. We use music like a medicine.

It is equally true that guns have shaped the history of nearly every modern civilization on earth. As agents of both expression and change, music and guns bear much in common.The combination of sound and fury was experienced by the people of my generation thirty-five years ago when we heard Jimi Hendrix rain down sonic bombs and musical missiles on the heads of Woodstock Nation, while half a world away real guns barked, and blood ran freely in the jungles of Vietnam. When Peter Townsend and Keith Moon windmilled their powerful anthems of angst across the 'teenage wasteland,' before slashing and smashing two tons of sound gear in a crackling crescendo of glorious cacophony. Even then, the electric guitar was as much a symbol of the Atomic Age as the H-bomb, and nearly as powerful.

It is small wonder that music and violence sometimes form an unholy union, for electricity itself is a medium of spark and hum. To unleash a thousand screaming watts of power and to wrestle it down in a room of rowdy patrons is to light a powder keg. Multiplying that power ten or twenty times before a stadium of disenchanted youth is to court reactions of all kinds, from joy and celebration to violence and tragedy. Ask the Stones after Altamont or The Who after Cincinnati.

The dark gods of violence have surely visited their wrath upon the music field. Who among us will ever forget the day in December 1980 when Mark David Chapman single-handedly destroyed perhaps the most important rock musician of all time?

The truth is that guns change things instantly and forever, their bloody results utterly irreversible.

We were reminded of this recently by the horrific shooting deaths of former Pantera and Damageplan guitarist "Dimebag" Darrell Abbott and three others. Rumors continue to abound that the heavy metal guitarist's shooter was a fan upset by the break-up of his favorite rock band.

Once upon a time, it was assumed that audiences were more fixated on the performance than the performer. No longer. Aggression toward an artist can be fueled by the roar of a Marshall stack or the razor-sharp turn of a lyrical phrase. Controversy causes ripples, like a rock thrown in a pond.

We think back to Charles Manson citing the Beatles 'Helter Skelter,' in his murder trial, or the band Judas Priest being sued in court for song lyrics purportedly glorifying the act of suicide. We think of John Hinckley's attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, supposedly to impress another celebrity, Jodie Foster. Even political recriminations, as in the recent re-election year furor caused by the Dixie Chicks.

Because of these and other examples of gray social areas, the debate over freedom of speech in music and literature continues to rage. Like the moviemakers who have been blamed for 'copycat' deaths resulting from viewers emulating the actions of screen heroes, and tobacco companies under siege from cancer-ridden smokers, rock bands are increasingly seen as being responsible for the violent actions of their fans.

But is this fair?

Stories of unexpected actions by lone gunmen are all too familiar in our country, as are celebrity murders. In a society where news and entertainment often meld in a seamless display of the lurid and titillating, where scandal seems as commonplace as statesmanship, murder involving celebrities is the Mother Of All Stories. A journalist's wet dream, it guarantees newsstand sales and high Nielson and Arbitron ratings.

The combination of celebrity and sudden tragedy will always draw a crowd, because human curiosity is strong and instinctual. It is the reason that many of us can't look away from a traffic accident. Like tragedy, deviant behavior and abnormal psychology are just plain fascinating to nearly everyone. And fascination, these days, means potential headlines.

It doesn't matter that mass murder is a statistical aberration. So is the probability of getting struck by lightning. The realization that mass murder can be premeditated and can target the most innocent among us spurs our collective paranoia.

In many respects, ours is an age of hysteria. Rumors spread through a county or a state like cracks through a broken window. With the advent of modern digital communication, the same can now be said of the whole world.

It is not surprising, then, that conspiracy theories are common. Whispered rumors involving the FBI, the CIA, the Mafia and UFOs are the larger, darker fabric of our national fears.

Did Kurt Cobain, reluctant spokesman of a generation given an alphabetical designation, blow his head off with a shotgun or was he murdered? Scully and Mulder remind us that many in our country believe that paranoia is merely heightened awareness.

This is just such a cultural climate that fosters hero worship, or, as Living Color sang, the 'Cult of Personality.'

While adolescent anxiety has probably existed forever, the very nature of our musical discontentment has changed markedly in the last thirty years. Where bands like The Kinks and The Sex Pistols were as much about satire as politics, today's rap and metal and goth and punk and industrial bands routinely embrace darkness and despair as part of the musical equation.

We live in a 'headphone culture' where even the most alienated of individuals can hear their agendas voiced. Even malcontents are no longer isolated. For instance, Marilyn Manson is a god of rejected adolescents everywhere because he gets to act out their poisonous fantasies on the world's stages.

Now it is possible to dial in one's level of aggression, anxiety and discontentment, whether it be by nihilism (Manson) neurosis (Trent Reznor) politics (Rage Against The Machine) or the wrong time of the month (Alanis Morrissette).

When the music of such marginalized personalities becomes popular in the mainstream, the "Outsiders" become the "Insiders."

This is one factor that has enabled an artist like Ozzy Osbourne to flourish for three decades. Now the beloved burnout of the boomer generation and founder of the nation's premier metalfest, Ozzy once fronted a band (Black Sabbath) thought too dark for radio airplay.

By its very nature, rock and roll itself is only once-removed from public spectacle, and little today is seen as truly sensational anymore, or, as Jane's Addiction so aptly said, 'Nothing's Shocking.' This modern phenomenon, our society often tells us, is called "desensitization."

Opponents of violent video games like "Quake" and "Unreal Tournament" agree. Blood-gushing, mind-numbing video combat may provide hours of cheap entertainment, but it may also be sending the type of subliminal signals that scare hell out of parents, teachers and social scientists everywhere.

Hollywood, of course, is the ultimate Evil Empire, manufacturing the latest edition of our American Dreams, even if many of these are actually nightmares of blazing guns and gruesome carnage. Desensitization and the reduced value of human life are inevitable consequences of these reinforced images.

And movies and television aren't the only media under public scrutiny.

Many rock bands fly on the black wings of modern disillusionment. In fact, it is not much of a stretch to claim that some think rock music the soundtrack of the Apocalypse, the dark and vile underbelly of the Beast.

Critics point to the fact that fantasy and reality frequently merge in rock music. The use of psychedelic imagery, cartoons and movies reinforces this sense of escapism. From Elton John's "Yellow Brick Road" to the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine," from David Bowie's androgynous space rocker "Ziggy Stardust" to Pink Floyd's psychotic masterpiece, "The Wall," we see our great rock albums as fiction. (Think of the classic rock band Kiss, comic-book superheroes in greasepaint and ten-inch heels).

Most of us can tell reality from fantasy, fact from fiction, but there are those who may not, for one reason or another, have the same powers of discernment.

Such is said to be the case with Nathan Gale, Abbott's assassin, who told others he believed the rock band Pantera had stolen his songs and lyrics.

The terrible shooting spree in Columbus has once again raised the disturbing question: "Does music cause violence?"

The answer: It does, it doesn't, it can, it can't, sometimes, all the time, never. The issues of cause and effect in modern life are so complex as to defy certitude and consensus.

Who is to say that music is not the final ingredient in the murderous stew of a troubled mind?

Unfortunately, in a free society of 300 million people, the odds say something terrible and inexplicable will happen occasionally.

Dimebag Darrell, R.I.P.

Keith Stover
© December, 2004
All Rights Reserved
koufax8@hotmail.com

MB: Keith is a freelance writer and rock musician who currently resides in Maine. We appreciate his timely submission on a tragedy that affected all of us in the Michigan music community.