Gamers Become Stars with Rock Band or Guitar Hero

Billboard has no such restriction on digital sales, and, especially right after Christmas, when both Guitar Hero III and Rock Band were top sellers, that chart displayed a definite Guitar Hero effect. The lower end of the top 200 singles was littered with songs from the games — everything from hoary classic rock chestnuts like the spooky 41-year-old Stones dirge "Paint It Black" and Foghat's riff-a-riffic cock rocker "Slow Ride" to Metallica's "One" and "Enter Sandman" and Ozzy Osbourne's "Crazy Train" to Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine" and "Welcome to the Jungle."

Even the two most overplayed songs in American radio history enjoyed a sales bump: Apparently, there were 23,000 Americans who both did not already own and were not sick to painful death of "Free Bird" and "Stairway to Heaven," a fact that says as much about the death of rock radio as it does the power of Guitar Hero.

The Sex Pistols reunited just to re-record their old classic "Anarchy in the U.K." just for inclusion on the Guitar Hero III soundtrack. ZZ Top, with "Sharp Dressed Man" on Guitar Hero I and "La Grange" on III, are the only Houstonians to have benefited so far. At the Orange Bowl halftime show earlier this year, the trio performed "Sharp Dressed Man." Would the band even have been invited to play pre-Guitar Hero? Would they have chosen that song if they had?

Less geriatric bands have also benefited. DragonForce, youthful purveyors of hilariously operatic and over-the-top metal, have become nearly legendary, due in no small part to their laughably hard-to-master Guitar Hero III song "Through the Fire and Flames." (Law-Yone calls it "the hardest song to do well on.")

Since the release of Guitar Hero III in November of last year, the song has sold 145,000 downloads, beating out all the more famed older bands.

Before the game's release, DragonForce was something of an underground phenomenon, albeit a successful one. Now, a few savvy rock stations are adding "Through the Fire and Flames" to their playlists.
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If you apprise Allen Hill of stats and figures like that, he'll laugh and say something like this: "Yeah, but can you break a string in the middle of a song in Guitar Hero?"

"The old man in me gets more and more pronounced every year," adds the thirtysomething. "Part of the point of playing music is getting there, the journey, and toiling away and then finally getting to the point where you say, 'Wow, cool, I can do that.' And learning things like how to tune an instrument."

Hill maintains that these games are at best, akin to karaoke. "Yeah, you can just get up there and go, but there's so much more to music than the karaoke version," he says. "And I guess the thing about karaoke is that it is an acceptable format to suck. That's practically the expectation."

Hill says the games lack randomness, improvisation, happy accidents, the insanity of real life, and he can't believe that so many people would rather play music vicariously than actually play music. "For me, playing music provides so much joy, and this seems to me more like reality television," he says, especially the star search shows like American Idol and Rockstar Supernova, which he believes nurture a false ideal of what performing is and/or should be.

What's more, Hill says that the interaction between a person and an instrument is the very process that makes one musician sound different from another, even if both of them have perfect pitch and play the same song on the same instruments.

"You lose the interaction with the instrument in producing the note," he says of these games' tone-neutral, pitch-perfect controllers. "Music in its simplest form is singing — that's why so many people do it, but if you are doing it right, you actually use your whole body to produce the note. Your vocal chords are just the reed. You're breathing, and it shows if you smoke or if you run. The physical element is part and parcel of creating music that is meaningful."

Hill sounds a lot like San Francisco Chronicle games reviewer Peter Hartlaub, who granted that the games were a ton of fun. In fact, that is the problem with them.

"Every once in a while I'll speak at a junior high school about my job, and as part of my spiel (don't do drugs!), I always try to explain the difference between fun and happiness," Hartlaub wrote in November of last year. "Fun is staying up with your friends on a school night and playing Halo 3. Happiness is getting into a good college, working hard in your twenties and later settling into a profession where someone will pay you to play Halo 3.

"Getting three friends together to play a nearly perfect version of Blue Öyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper' in the game Rock Band is a lot of fun. Getting the same friends together, buying some instruments, practicing really hard and playing a really shaky version of 'Don't Fear the Reaper' is a lot more likely to make you happy."

"Yeah, I concur with that thought, even if I might use different words," Hill says. "My high school band did do a cover of 'Don't Fear the Reaper,' and it was fun, and it made us happy."

john.lomax@houstonpress.com