Herman Brood: Rock ’n Roll’s Junkie

One hundred fifty words or so, that’s all it took for news wire reports to funnel out the story of Dutch rock singer Herman Brood’s July 11, 2001 suicide. One hundred and fifty words to sum up the life and times of the sort of rock and roll True Believer that seems impossible; one who could only outrageously exist in the wild-eyed imaginations of rockroll daydreamers or the dollar signed minds of Hollywood myth-mongers. One hundred fifty meager words that mean spit - nothing at all. Herman Brood, dead at 55 years old.

What does mean something is the way Brood lived. His was a life fueled by, for, and entirely about, rock and roll. It was Herman Brood’s life, the rock and roll way, every moment right up to the very last moment. It was Herman Brood…period.

Born in 1946, Brood was another precocious child of the post World War Two celebratory boom. And like most coming of age in the post-war restoration and reformation in Europe, Brood was a child of the limitless possibilities of a scarred European psyche remaking itself in a more (as a result of world war) globalized world. At age 17 Brood entered art school and quickly got swept up by the then raging 1960’s British/European rock and roll fury.

Spending time in a number of musical groups Brood, who proved to be a merely adequate singer and a streaky, only sometimes spot-on songwriter, quickly established a reputation for his reverence for early rock and roll, his wild and energetic songs, and, moreover, his passionate embrace of the wild, out-of-control partying rockroll lifestyle cliché. Brood loved and truly lived the music, mostly devoting himself in service to his fondness for early American rock and roll.

Brood, it seemed, was set on a lifetime of not only making his own music but also honoring the likes of Little Richard, Mose Allison, and the legions of other early rock pioneers whom he consistently acknowledged in interviews and from the concert stage - always laying credit to the forebears before breaking into wildly reverent cover renditions of their old songs.

As Brood became somewhat of a star in Europe throughout the early 1970’s fronting a variety of bands and recording numerous records filled with R&B influenced no-frills rock and roll, his American fetish remained beyond his reach. Having established a more than modest level of success in his European homelands, Brood seemed constantly poised to finally breakout internationally. And America, home of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, was the place Brood always knew it would have to happen.

Finally, in 1978, Brood and his band Wild Romance brushed up against the international stardom he’d always pined for. It was Brood’s snarling song “Saturday Night” that found its way onto American Top 40 radio and caused the stir that finally made Brood a bonafide (if short-term) sensation in the United States as well as in his native Europe. Alas, as things American are want to be, it wasn’t a lasting fame. Subsequent albums fell on critical-to-deaf ears and, although the lack of sustained stardom didn’t stop Brood’s rock and roll heart, it clearly became a melancholy experience that may have fanned the already present destructive flames of his now infamous drug-based party lifestyle.

Brood continued performing for another dozen years or so, never giving up the rock and roll idiom. In 1990 Brood stepped back from music for a short time to concentrate on painting and poetry. His work was a weird, sometimes dazzling mix of psychedelia, chaos, and high energy. Even on canvas and in verse Herman Brood continued in homage to, and worked to create and share, his eternal rock and roll dream. In 1996 Brood crossed the half-century mark in age and was the object of a national celebration of all things Brood (a concert/party was simulcast on European television). Fifty years old and still bleeding rock and roll crimson; not to shabby for a guy who could hardly sing, but could swagger and swing like nearly no one else.

Shortly after his death (in true Brood-ian rockroll style, Herman took flight from the roof of the beautiful and renowned Amsterdam Hilton, falling hundreds of feet to his untimely demise) friends alleged that Brood, who had been warned by physicians to cut out his continuing abuse of drugs and drink a year earlier, had deteriorated mentally as well as physically. He’d been open with friends and media about the difficulties of staying sober, as well as his ongoing depression, and had, prior to his death, reportedly told a close friend that he didn’t want to “fade away.”

Someone once said that rock and roll is no reason to die, rather it is every reason to live. Herman Brood absolutely lived because of - and in service to - rock and roll. His was a completely rock and roll life, gone but never forgotten. But you just have to hear the man speak for himself to know what he was all about. "Rock and Roll Junkie" from the same 1979 record, Shpritsz, that spawned the "Saturday Night" hit is Herman Brood at his best, it is the ultimate veneration of the music he lived for; his life's blood. In it Brood decries the disco-goings of his rock and roll heroes; The Stones had picked up the dance beat, as did Rod Stewart, and even some rock and roll punks, and in this dynamite cut Brood feared for the true rock and roll future.

Frightfully, his own words seemed to call on that future as Brood sings "When I do my suicide for you, child, I hope you'll miss me too". But bittersweet irony aside, "Rock and Roll Junky" is a confession of the most glorious sort and, setting prurience aside, the song distills itself into the most important phrase Brood ever uttered: "I got a heart and soul baby / got a heart and soul/ rock'n'roll junkie." Amen.

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