(personal underlines)
What’s sadder than an ageing rocker?
It’s time for Jagger et al to retire
‘Old soldiers…’ they used to say, ‘never die. They simply fade away.’ What a shame that the same can’t be said of old rock stars. The old codgers can’t be cajoled, shamed or otherwise persuaded to kindly leave the stages they have profitably adorned for half a century or more.
This unworthy thought came to me the other day as I watched 75-year-old Bruce Springsteen creakily strutting his stuff at a campaign rally for cackling Kamala. I have been a fan of the Boss since the 1970s when the perceptive critic Jon Landau dubbed him ‘the future of rock and roll’. But now that he has become the past of rock and roll, Brucie and his fellow rocker OAPs should hang up their guitars and sweaty jeans and prepare to the great recording studio in the sky.
Springsteen’s angst-ridden hymns seemed to suit the spirit of an anxious age – hymns to urban hard-scrabble American youth, racing their Chevvies in the summer streets, always menaced by unemployment, the mob, unwanted pregnancies and the decay of young lust into marital misery. But what is appropriate for a skinny young dude wondering from where his next meal or lay is coming looks absurd now that the Boss is a multi-millionaire long-married man, more worried about replacing hips and knees than getting girls to dance.
Rock is a young person’s game. Its sounds, lyrics and themes are all about the joys, insecurities and embarrassments of youth. Isn’t it ridiculous, odd, or even faintly obscene for octogenarian wrinklies to still be belting out songs about not getting satisfaction when they are on their third marriage and forty-fourth world tour?
Springsteen is hardly alone in his reluctance to call it a night. A whole roster of rockers are still just about raving. The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, the squabbling remnants of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and a host of other fading stars of yesteryear are still, in Dylan’s words, ‘out on the road’ when they should be tucked up in bed with a nice mug of Horlicks. They are pretending to suffer the pangs of unrequited young love when their contemporaries are more concerned about getting a GP’s appointment or losing their winter fuel payments.
I have only seen the Stones perform once: many years ago at the Knebworth Festival. Jagger, who was then, I guess, in his late forties, was skipping around the stage like a cheetah on heat or speed, with the enviable energy of a 14-year-old. His zoom may come from being the son of a PE teacher, or it could be because, contrary to his carefully calculated wild-man image, Mick actually lives a conservative lifestyle of moderation that explains his perfectly preserved physique and his willingness to go through the same old numbers and, aged 81, hitch his hips for the umpteenth time. Either way, the old rogue and his band mate frenemy Keith Richards, aka ‘the man that death forgot’, seem to have found a formula for defying age.
Or is it simply that the Stones and other members of their antiquated generation actually enjoy what they do and see no reason to stop? Their equally aged fans are as ready to fork out astronomic sums for tickets to hear their croaky concerts as they were to scrape together the pennies to purchase vinyl 45s in their distant youth. So who am I to play the spoilsport and point out the incongruity of such geriatric oldsters warbling about fancying teenagers?
My lifelong rock hero, Jim Morrison of the Doors, had the good taste to die at 27, the same dangerous age that claimed the lives of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse and Kurt Cobain. Jim, a notorious lush, either breathed his last in the bath of his Paris apartment or expired from a heroin overdose in a nightclub toilet, depending on which story you believe. That, it seems to me, is a more fitting end for a member of his ephemeral profession, the celebrants of drink, drugs, fast cars and living on the dangerous edge of things. Certainly it is more aesthetically congruent than staggering on for decades before finally conking out between the sheets, not of sexual excess, but of some smelly disease.
‘Hope I die before I get old,’ sang Pete Townshend of the Who in 1965 in ‘My Generation’. Mr Townshend clearly had second thoughts about that, as he is still happily with us at a venerable 79. But the band’s drummer Keith Moon did die, aged 32, after a brief career spent abusing booze and pills, kicking holes in expensive drum kits and trashing hotel suites – on one occasion blowing up a bathroom with a stick of dynamite.
Such self-destruction is sad for the stars and their families, and it is clearly an irresponsible way to behave, but isn’t rock supposed to be irresponsible? Maturing quietly and gently may be difficult when bawdiness and irreverence is all you’ve known, but it is better by far than posing as a horny adolescent while heading for a care home.
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