Rock And Age

[Brian Cady]

A not bad report on the subject (for once) from The
Guardian (U.K.)

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1724366,00.html?gusrc=rss

Sexagenarians, drugs and rock'n'roll 

Once they hoped to die before they got old, but no
longer - sixtysomethings are back at the top of the
charts. Tim de Lisle explains why the wrinklies just
keep on rocking 

Monday March 6, 2006
The Guardian 
  
Recently Paul McCartney met a man who plays the piano
in an old people's home. "I hope you don't mind," the
pianist said, "but I play some of your songs and the
most popular one is When I'm 64." Ah yes, the sugary
music-hall ditty from Sergeant Pepper that people
either love or hate. "But I have to change the title,"
the man went on, "because 64 seems young to those
people. They don't get it." So he sings When I'm 84
instead. McCartney sees his point: "If I were to write
it now," he told the Los Angeles Times last month,
"I'd probably call it When I'm 94."

McCartney will be 64 himself in June. He has a young
band, a young producer, a young wife, a small child,
and youngish hair; his age shows only in his jowls,
the odd creak in his voice and an air of gathering
urgency, which led him to open the proceedings at
Live8 as well as close them. He still needs us, and he
is not alone. There were three new entries in last
week's British album chart, all from McCartney's
contemporaries: Neil Diamond, 65, Dolly Parton, just
60, and Ray Davies of the Kinks, 61. Welcome to
sexagenarian rock'n'roll.

The music business still has its meteors - the Arctic
Monkeys are all under 21, and the new star of British
soul, Corinne Bailey Rae, is 26. But there is a flurry
of activity from the elders of the tribe. David
Gilmour of Pink Floyd, 60 today, is celebrating by
releasing a rare solo album. Van Morrison, also 60,
releases his umpteenth CD today. Joan Baez, 65, is
touring this week.

The Rolling Stones, 246 between them, are in the
middle of another world tour. Bob Dylan, 64, is
forever on the road, though this may actually be an
experiment to establish how badly he can maul his old
songs before his fans walk out. Leonard Cohen, 71, is
working on a new album. (This is the man who, when he
took his songs to agents in New York, was asked,
"Aren't you a little old for this game?" He was 32.)
BB King, 80, will be here in April for his farewell
tour. Not that farewell necessarily means adieu. Elton
John, 58, will play Britain's sports grounds this
summer, possibly forgetting that he announced his
retirement from live performance in 1977.

Then there's the Who. Having somehow survived the
death of half their line-up, decades of dormancy and
Pete Townshend's encroaching deafness, they are still
big enough to headline festivals this summer. The band
that hoped they would die before they got old must
increasingly find their own lyrics quoted back at
them: "Why don't you all just f-fade away?"

This question has many answers. Bands play on because
they love it, or they're addicted to the roar of the
crowd, or because it's what they do. Rock is a hybrid
form, drawing on blues, country, folk and gospel:
cultures that attach no stigma to seniority. It's only
the final ingredient in the recipe - youth culture -
that makes us surprised to find a person of 60 singing
rock songs.

The truth, however, is that music hasn't been ruled by
the young for years now. More than half of all CDs are
bought by people over 30; Mojo, the magazine for the
greying fan, outsells NME; even big-selling young
bands settle on a sound that is reactionary (Oasis),
retro (the Kaiser Chiefs) or colossally reassuring
(Coldplay).

It used to be assumed that rock was like football or
chess, offering its best players a brief blazing
heyday followed by an inevitable decline. Lately, it
has looked more like golf, promising 40-year careers
and only a slow fade. Now it may be shifting again, to
become more like writing or painting. Some stars will
burn out, others will flicker, and a few will shine
brighter with age.

What is the formula for rock longevity? Asked how he
had managed to keep going into his 50s, Iggy Pop
replied: "I'm not bald, I'm not fat, and I'm not
safe." Many stars manage to adhere to at least two of
these criteria. Strangely few rock singers are bald
(has toupee technology secretly moved on?), and those
who are wear a hat, like Van Morrison, or divert
attention with comedy braiding arrangements, like
Keith Richards.

Safety is another matter. Iggy may retain his anarchic
energy, but not many grizzled survivors still have an
air of danger. John Cale, 63, is perhaps an exception,
having found a new lease of life playing "dirty-ass
rock'n'roll", as he calls it, in sweaty clubs, almost
40 years after changing the course of rock in his
capacity as the viola player with the Velvet
Underground.

Craftsmanship hardly ages at all, and smarter
songwriters have used it to defuse the issue of age
itself. Paul Simon, 64, wrote a song baldly entitled
Old, arguing that people of 50 or 60 were not old in
the context of human history, a point that could have
been tediously earnest in the hands of a less gifted
writer. Leonard Cohen used self-deprecating wit in
Tower of Song: "Now my friends have gone, and my hair
is grey/I ache in the places where I used to play."
Randy Newman, 61, did it with satire, lampooning
ageing rockers in a song called I'm Dead (But I Don't
Know It). "I have nothing left to say," Newman
gleefully yelped over some dumb guitars, making it
clear he didn't really mean himself, "but I'm going to
say it anyway."

Ry Cooder, 58, deliberately seeks out musicians far
older than himself. "I always thought you need to find
the oldest person," he said last year, "because they
know the secret things that can't be described, or
written down, or put in DVD form. They have the
capacity to play and sing the beautiful thing that
comes from the inside." With Buena Vista Social Club,
Cooder assembled musicians aged 65 to 90 for an album
that was expected to sell 400,000 copies and ended up
achieving 10 times that.

In the fight for ongoing credibility, however, the
sharpest weapon is excellence. Neil Diamond's new
record, 12 Songs, sold 40,000 copies in Britain in a
week, twice as many as his previous album managed in
four years, even though he didn't promote it here. It
was because, as nearly all the critics agreed, he had
made an outstanding album: lean, glitz-free, and
unflinching ("I'm too old to pretend"). It was the
musical equivalent of replacing a combover with a
crop.

The template here is Johnny Cash, who released four
albums of searing honesty in the decade before his
death in 2003. Cash's producer was the hip-hop
entrepreneur Rick Rubin, who also produced Diamond's
new album. "They're both grown-ups, and there aren't
many great albums by grown-ups," Rubin said recently.
"There's no reason why great artists shouldn't make
their best records when they're 50, 60, 70. In other
disciplines, it would be expected." Disciplines! Rock
really must have changed.


-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com

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