as if it's composed of mainly old farts...
Sexagenarians, drugs and rock'n'roll
Monday March 6, 2006
The Guardian
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,,1724366,00.html
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.
Mick Jagger and Ray Davies Rocking on: Mick Jagger and Ray Davies,
still performing at 62 and 61, respectively. Photographs: Natacha
Pisarenko/AP and Jo Hale/Getty
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.
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