When I'm 94
- From: "DGDevin" <dgdevin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2006 19:04:42 GMT
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.
.
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