Rock 'n' other roles

In APRIL, Greg Graffin, a professor in the UCLA life sciences department, arrived on the campus of Harvard University to accept an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, an honor that had gone to Salman Rushdie the previous year. The studious-looking Graffin stood at a podium and delivered a thoughtful lecture on the history of humanism and its meaning in his life. It was, he says, one of the highlights of his academic career.

Weeks later, Graffin is in Irvine addressing a very different kind of audience. He stands in front of 20,000 rock fans at a concert known rather appropriately as the Weenie Roast. It is nearly 100 degrees, and Graffin is pacing back and forth as the members of his long-standing punk band, Bad Religion, play behind him at breakneck speed. He raises the microphone and sings to the crowd: "If there's a purpose for us all / it remains a secret to me / don't ask me to justify my life." As he does, thousands of young fans, many of them wearing Bad Religion shirts, sing along. The band leaves the stage to thunderous applause.

Graffin signs autographs, then retreats into an air-conditioned trailer. Asked what it feels like to have such a passionate following, he seems unfazed. "If you don't have good self-awareness, being in a successful band will really screw you up," Graffin says. "I don't have any control what people think about me. And I understand that they don't really know me. What you saw out there were thousands of totally different experiences. But my goal has always been to elevate the art form. If a fan tells me they did a term paper on evolution because of one of my songs, it's very touching."

There's a notion that rock musicians who have tasted even the smallest amount of success will, like the proverbial high school quarterback, spend their remaining days yearning for past glories and lamenting what might have been. It can be nearly impossible to replicate the rush of performing in front of a rapturous crowd, and anything like normality can seem a devastating comedown.

So they cling. Scan the music listings on any week and you'll find reunion shows, many for bands that hardly warranted attention even in their prime. Retread, not reinvention, is too often the rule. But there are, of course, some notable exceptions.