Foreword: THODORIS MANIKAS

Those of us who grew up with rock music entered, at some moment in our lives, an informal contract with the heroes who create and express it. We, with our admiration and devotion, willingly took on the task of ensuring them a glorious career that would transcend their biological cycle. And, in return, they took on the task of creating and gifting us the soundtrack for our entire lives.

Their music was often there before we were born and, as part of their assumed contractual obligation, it has always remained by our side: in our upbringing, in our first loves, in the joy of our successes and the crushing weight of our failures, in the losses of significant people, in the birth of our children.

This was demanded by the elders among us, the generations of rockers from the drought era, and we took up this baton. To keep by our side until the end, invulnerable as our greater selves and life itself, those who form the Club of the Dead Rockers.

From Lemmy to John Belushi and from Janis to Roy Buchanan, an anti-heroic hall of fame, the lives of its members become advocates of death, a death that simultaneously mediates to preserve, through collective memory, the raw material that keeps us alive, inspired, and active.