Why does the hotel-trashing rock star even exist?

And why has no one died from objects flung from hotel windows?

When I was about 14, I was hanging out in the fifth-floor apartment of one of my closest friends growing up when, by the grace of the good fortune, I avoided what could’ve turned out to be an awful tragedy. My friend lived one building over from mine and we would spend hours and hours talking late into the night in the kitchen of that apartment, where he lived with his parents, younger brother, and kid sister. The kitchen window looked out onto the building’s front courtyard, with two walkways leading to the front entrance.

It being summertime, he had the window propped open with a thick, solid block of wood and, in a moment of absentmindedness, I raised the window further, which loosened the block so that it fell down to the ground below. Luckily, nobody happened to be walking underneath at that moment, but it could’ve been really ugly. I managed not to wrack myself with guilt over it, and just kind of got a firm grip over myself, focusing on the fact that that was a serious mistake, and that I needed to be more careful with things like that, but that it was okay because no one had been injured or… worse.

So whenever I hear about rock bands hurling televisions out of hotel room windows, I’m always struck by how there’s no mechanism in place to catch these people before they act, no one to step in and say “Hey, someone could seriously get hurt.” I don’t know, maybe there are rock bands who, when they get the itch to be destructive, send a roadie downstairs to make sure the coast is clear. If that’s the case, such well-behaved foresight would be both impressive and comical.

I wouldn’t know if that’s the case, seeing as the urge to just break shit out of sheer boredom and decadence (instead of, say, anger) is just so alien to me that I can’t relate. From a certain perspective, though, I can see how throwing things out of hotel room windows could be mistaken for freedom. After all, the average person would never get away with such a thing. Famous musicians, of course, are judged by a different standard.

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When rock stars destroy hotel rooms and send their contents tumbling out the window, the band’s handlers pay the bill and the rock and roll circus moves on to the next town to wreak its havoc there. But we barely bat an eyelash. We either shrug it off or cheer it on or snicker to ourselves, accepting that this is simply the way people behave when they reach a certain echelon of popularity.

The hotel-trashing rock star has, in fact, become such an enduring staple of rock mythology that it’s practically indispensable at this point. The more moldy and clichéd the idea grows with age, the more quaint a reminder of rock’s glorious past it becomes. I mean, wouldn’t any musician who pulled that nonsense past 1985 or so look like a buffoon?

And yet check out the warm-fuzzy tone of this Conan segment:

Granted, Conan is being somewhat ironic/sarcastic when he seems to glamorize guitarist Joe Walsh’s hijinks with late comedian John Belushi, but the clip is nevertheless a good indicator of the fondness we have for hotel destruction as a culture. Full disclosure: I love Joe Walsh’s playing. I even love how he plays-up sounding slightly brain damaged when he speaks.

I once paid something like $30 — a lot of money to a high schooler in the ‘80s — to see Walsh play a two-song set and walk out of the venue. I remember the confusion turning into shock, which turned into outrage, with irate fans jeering Walsh in the street as he was escorted to his bus. Sure, I was disappointed, but I nevertheless loved what I heard, and I’ve always had a fond memory of the experience, partly because it was surreal, humorous and, in its own way, almost touching.

To be clear: I’m not sure that Walsh just decided to bail on the show and leave his fans high and dry. Looking at his eyes through coke-bottle glasses as he was whisked away, he looked disoriented and frightened that people were yelling at him, so I wonder if there hadn’t been some miscommunication with the promoter. But the tired hotel-trashing schtick takes the person I saw in Walsh’s eyes (and, for that matter, the larger-than-life persona he’s famous for) and pushes it over the line, making him seem like more of a cretinous Neanderthal than a lovable eccentric with a wild streak.

Walsh was infamously foolish enough to burn tens of thousands of dollars a night — an even more outrageously exorbitant expense in the ‘70s, mind you — just to indulge the urge to… to do what exactly? To remind himself that he was in a position to piss-away more money than the average person made in a year? What a miracle that rock stars somehow escape being strung-up from lampposts!

I’m not saying Walsh should be hoisted from a lamppost. The Conan clip is actually quite funny and he’s clearly able to make fun of his past excesses. But I’d bet he couldn’t offer anything remotely resembling a real answer as to why he behaved the way he did. And the I-can-waste-more-money-than-you’ll-ever-touch kind of attitude is just obnoxious considering how ticket prices have mushroomed to unimaginable heights.

I mean, would musicians talk about trashing hotel rooms with the same winking nonchalance if every few months a group of music fans broke into a different rocker’s mansion and went berserk? If something like that ever did happen, you’d see rock stars turn into finger-wagging school marms faster than it takes a TV set to fall 14 stories into a the pool of a Holiday Inn.

“Before you know it, telephones are flying out the window — and we’re on, like, the 20th floor” — a story told by Megadeth’s former road manager (see clip)

Okay, so hotels are generic monuments to homogeneity. Fair enough. But how is it that no one’s ever been killed after being struck by falling debris in one of these incidents, at least that we know of? And what does the equation of mindless destruction with “rebellion” and “cool” say about us? My answer: it says that people feel so confined in their lives that they’ll latch onto anything that looks like an escape from that confinement.

The thing is, famous musicians feel confined in their lives too. Everyone from Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan to Karen O of The Yeah Yeah Yeahs has talked about the phenomenon of suddenly finding themselves getting dragged along by an unstoppable momentum as a giant machine springs into action around them. McKagan and O have both compared their sense of powerlessness to being inside the eye of a hurricane. I’m guessing these feelings, as voiced by McKagen, O, and so many others in their position, play a major role in why people in their position act out.

I’ve often tried to imagine what it would feel like to have the next several years of your life scheduled, like getting stuck on a ride spinning ever more rapidly to the point where it’s too scary to jump off — all because you were successful at achieving a goal most people can only dream of. If success becomes a cage, the hotel room is as good a target as any for clanging against the bars of that cage — to no avail, of course. (I mean, if rock stars destroy hotel rooms, that means they’re on tour, which means they’re dutifully showing up for work where they’re expected to show up for work. It’s just that their job entails what one-time touring musician Clay Tarver described as “23 hours of stultifying boredom.”)

The average person, on the other hand, just isn’t afforded the latitude to break every social rule they can get away with. Many forms of punishment — all dire — await people with regular jobs who dare attempt to break free from the downward gravitational force of social norms: condemnation, banishment, imprisonment, and even death. But the most powerful deterrents, I imagine, aren’t the more severe of those outcomes.

Perhaps it’s actually the condemnation from our peers that keeps us in line the most.

The message we all learn to intuit is direct, unequivocal — and simple enough for a child to understand:

If your feet aren’t on the ground, you can bet your ass we’re going to NAIL them down for you…

…unless, of course, you become famous, at which point we’ll cheer you on and feed you as much rope as you want until you hang yourself!

Wait, what?!!

Allow me to back up…

Naturally, the constriction of social rules fosters a strong desire for escape. Celebrities are people who’ve managed to achieve the escape velocity required to pull away from the earth, in a sense, and find themselves in a kind of zero-gravity existence. The public supports that kind of existence, even though doing so only reinforces the fact that we aren’t allowed to climb past the barricade to get there ourselves.

On first glance, it looks like we do this so we can live vicariously through these people, but I think there’s something else at play.

(But first, this is just hilarious, OMG:)

Even aging musicians keep up the pretense of bad behavior — everything from doing a bunch of drugs to sleeping-in until 5:00 in the afternoon. It seems kind of pitiful, actually. Like they get stuck in an image of rock stardom they were sold on and can’t let go of. Maybe they’re disappointed after coming to the rude realization that having total impunity isn’t much fun at all. (Of course, I can’t speak from experience on that one, but have you ever observed how small children behave when they aren’t told “no” enough? They only get more petulant, more angry. Hmm.)

In an odd way, though, people in this position understand that their fans are counting on that fantasy to be real — the same fantasy that must slip through the rock star’s fingertips when they learn how the sausage is made, and when they have to confront ugly truths like negative press, bad encounters with their own heroes, paparazzi, overdoses, claustrophobia, paranoia, burnout, and being hounded halfway to death by people who claim to love you.

It occurs to me: part of what famous people are rebelling against is us.

Like: if you’re going to act like you OWN me, if you WANT me to destroy myself just to make art that YOU love, then I’m going to start swinging at whatever I can.

In that light, the hotel-destruction ritual isn’t simply lame, but desperate. Because what do famous people have to swing against? On close inspection, the answer is: not much.

And there’s another side to this equation that reveals a sinister party hiding in the shadows. (Hint: it isn’t the rock stars or the record labels.)

More than we wish we could be in famous people’s shoes, perhaps, we secretly want them to get punished for their excesses. Not only do we get to stoke our lurid fascinations and revel in all the outrageous things they do (without having to pay the price), but we also get to derive reassurance that we’re the ones on the right track when we watch them suffer consequences like addiction and death.

In a roundabout way, rock stars — and destroyed hotel rooms — don’t exist as reminders to rebel against the social order. On the contrary, they remind us of the opposite! The hotel-trashing rock star exists as a reminder that being conventional and living a mundane life is actually the more elitist path.

If famous people represent Icarus flying too close to the sun, then we’re the ones who send them crashing back down to earth in spectacular fashion. Secretly, we love to gawk at the crash because it's a confirmation that everything has its proper place in a natural order that dictates very tight boundaries for just about everyone except for the rare exceptions. But even those exceptions, alas, must eventually pay the tab.

Over and over, this same drama plays out, all while we get to stay right where we are — barely having to lift a finger, looking up to these people while we look down on everything they represent. (Or maybe looking up at what they represent and down on them, I’m not sure.)

And if you have any doubt as to which direction we’re actually looking: watch what happens if anyone in your community or social circle starts acting as flamboyant as Freddie Mercury, as overtly sexual as Prince, as eccentric as Björk, or as mouthy as Liam Gallagher.

When it comes to hero worship, up is down, down is up, and what looks like freedom and power is actually just a really long leash.

Then again, I can live with bands trashing hotel rooms if that’s what they need to do to deliver onstage like this:

<3 SRK