CARLTON FLETCHER: Rock dead? Not with Greta Van Fleet’s emergence

Rock is dead … long live rock.

— The Who

Rock and roll music has been eulogized as dead or dying so many times since Big Joe Turner released “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in 1954 and Bill Haley and His Comets dropped “Rock Around the Clock” in 1955, it’s become almost a cliche.

But there’s no denying that the genre of music that gave us the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, James Taylor, Elton John, Pearl Jam, Eric Clapton, Johnny Rivers, Chuck Berry, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, CCR, Metallica and so many other great musicians has definitely seen its better days.

Yet rock and roll lives on. And when its heartbeat has lost its rhythm and its breathing becomes labored, some new artist — a Nirvana or a Tool or an Imagine Dragons or a Foo Fighters — has come along to give it new life and remind us why we loved the music so much in the first place.

With no less dignitaries than the members of KISS — and there’s an impeccable source — declaring for about the 847,000th time that rock music has met its ultimate demise, a new savior of the art form has arisen from the streets of Michigan. And as 2017 winds to an end, it is rockers Greta Van Fleet who wear the perhaps unwelcome mantel of new saviors of rock and roll.

And as a rapidly growing fan base will attest, the band wears it well.

Formed five years ago in Frankenmuth, Mich., by brothers Josh, Jake and Sam Kiszka and their friend Kyle Hauck (who was replaced a short while later by Danny Wagner), Greta Van Fleet knocked around that fertile musical region before expanding in a big way in 2017. The starting point of that expansion can be traced back to an episode of the Showtime series “Shameless,” which featured GVF’s “Highway Tune.”

Greta Van Fleet — which features Wagner on drums, Jake Kiszka on lead guitar, Sam Kiszka on bass and banshee-voiced Josh Kiszka on vocals — released their debut EP, “Black Smoke Rising,” midyear, then expanded it into a double EP (what many of us used to call an “album”) in November. That latter work, “From the Fires,” features not only “Highway Tune” but “Safari Song,” the absolute best song of 2017.

If you hear “Safari Song” with no introductory prelude, you’ll be forgiven if you happen to swear it’s some lost track from Led Zeppelin’s early 1970s heyday. From the guitar crunch to the pounding drums to Josh Kiszka’s vocals that sound so much like Robert Plant when he could hit all those high notes (Plant, it should be noted, proved with his own great release of 2017, “Carry Fire,” that he can still hit most of those notes) that it’s eerie, “Safari Song” should be the tune that properly expands Greta Van Fleet’s influence to rock music fans who’ve sat around for the last few years, listening to their old Springsteen and Van Morrison records, waiting for some new rock revival.

It should be stated here for the record: The fact that GVF sound so much like Zeppelin is in no way an indication that they’re little more than copycats, trying to cash in on some forerunner’s already perfectly harvested ground. Listen to the entirety of “From the Fires” and you hear a band with its own unique sound. It’s just that part of that sound is stunningly reminiscent of the greatest hard rock band — sorry, Metallica, you’ll have to stay at No. 2, at least until you come up with another “Ride the Lightning” — ever.

That being said, it also should be noted for the record that, since music is cyclical, and rock music has been mined for 70-plus years by musicians both good, bad, awful and derivative, finding a totally unique “sound” is pretty much an impossibility. It’s how musicians take their influences and meld them into their own something new that separates the copycats from the innovators.

Greta Van Fleet are the real thing. If you’re one of those rock true believers who’s been waiting for such a coming — or even a young newcomer to the magic of ’60s and ’70s rock who doubts your own generation — by all means listen to GVF. You’ll be glad you got on the bandwagon before it got so crowded.

Rock dead? Not when there’s a Great Van Fleet out there making music. Long may they roll.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.

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