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Rock ’n’ roll is bad for your health, or so local garage rock band Kennedy wanted us to believe at their Spaceland show last Thursday night. During their final song, perhaps due to pressure brought on by the wild stunts of his predecessors, the frontman of Kennedy (who announced that the names of all three band members were Kennedy as well) proceeded to pound an entire 40 ounce bottle of Absolut Vodka.

But so what? Rock stages have certainly seen worse. Ozzy Osbourne chewed the heads off small winged mammals, Sid Vicious liked to draw on himself with razors, and Iggy Pop used everything from broken glass to peanut butter to fresh vomit as fair game for a good live set. As far as legends go in rock ’n’ roll or college night life, Kennedy wasn’t making history. More likely, he was just doing his job.

Still, when he dropped the empty bottle from a dramatically outstretched hand and grabbed his bass to join the band just in time to finish the last chorus, I looked at my watch. Rock ’n’ roll hero or not, he was a skinny guy, and I gave him two minutes to hit the floor. We were all a little surprised to see him make it through the song, and then quite elegantly make it off the stage.

Except there was an encore. Kennedy bounced right back, sang about something which sounded roughly like “Chunky Monkey” and didn’t miss a beat. It was a great encore. In fact, maybe too great of an encore for a skinny rock monkey who put enough 80 proof in his system to fill a goldfish bowl not 10 minutes before. When he finished and walked offstage in good enough shape to bring home to one’s mother, my friend couldn’t help but investigate. She asked him on the spot whether he had faked it, and reported back two things. His response: “Would I lie to you, baby?” and the smell of his breath: according to her, absolutely not of vodka.

So, granted that anything’s possible and that the man may have a tolerance level of a gorilla, I’ll let the reader decide just what was being drunk.

But I left the club that night with a scrunched forehead. Indeed, the very nature of the word stage, the home of rock ’n’ roll mayhem, refers to the verb “to stage,” meaning “to fake” or “to act.” My Shakespeare professor reminded me recently that one who goes to the theater is paying to be deluded or tricked. The goal of the actors on stage is to momentarily convince the audience of a two-hour fantasy, and thus provide escape from the tensions of every day reality. I don’t think a rock show is so different.

Still, when Ozzy Osbourne eats a bat, he eats a bat. For diehard fans of rock ’n’ roll, who refuse to digest anything MTV-made, their first defense of the often raw and gritty music is that it’s real, and the emotions that are played out on the stage or life of the rocker bring real consequences. But when Britney Spears gets married on the notion of a joke, her incubated world of wealth and fame allows her to annul it the very next day.

I’m not defending the unhealthy choices some rock musicians have made, as unfortunately, many of the genre’s greatest have obliterated themselves this way. But what was once rock ’n’ roll is being endlessly and emptily copied by a thousand bands hoping to be the next Big Thing.

But the fact still remains that what’s not original and what’s not honest is not rock ’n’ roll. So maybe we need to kill the whole thing altogether, in order not to lose what was once great about it. Maybe it’s time for whatever created rock ’n’ roll in the first place to rescramble its palate, and spit out something as equally revolutionary and magical as when the blues picked up its pace and got the teenagers dancing.