The End of the Line...
Or, what happens to all that life experience when all anyone cares about is what you did in your 20s?
If you watch the latest Bruce Springsteen bio-film on Hulu, there is the inevitable understanding that the day will come, and sooner than you think, when Bruce is no longer the Bruce he’s been for the last 60 years—think about that!
It got me thinking of two things.
One, is that we are nearing the end of seeing the originators, live and in person, of all the music that is now considered iconic and emblematic of the great age of rock and roll, of music as a cultural force—it is not today—and of the idea that it will change the world. Inform perhaps. Annoy? Maybe. But it is not viewed as it once was by people now long in the tooth.
Two, is the great ache of age and how little it informs modern music. Not that it doesn’t exist, but that it isn’t valued in the same way the early music was and is. Show of hands, how many of you have heard the latest from Springsteen, McCartney, the Stones, Peter Gabriel as examples? This isn’t uncommon. Artists continue to create works throughout their lives. Most of which they release. Have you heard Clapton’s new album? Did you know he had one coming out?
If you did, is your first impulse to compare it to the music he put out from the 60s to the 80s? Is that fair? Good? If you love all the early stuff is there any reason to listen to any of his new songs?
Here’s a fun question for all you oldsters out there: What was the most popular song of 1969? Year of Woodstock; seminal albums Abbey Road (Beatles), Tommy (The Who), Santana (Carlos Santana), Let it Bleed (Rolling Stones), Led Zeppelin II, Everyone Knows This is Nowhere (Neil Young), Creedence Clearwater Revival, In the Court of the Crimson King, The Band, and many more. It was a seminal year in rock music.
Must have come from one of them, no?
No. Not even close.
That doesn’t mean anything, you say; those albums have all held up over the course of time, critically, and are now the legacy rights of those albums are worth the big dough. Which the owners are selling because it’s the time to cash out before they drop dead. Think I’m kidding? David Crosby moaned often before he died about how little his catalog was earning compared to the old days (60s -90s). And like all the bands and artists who in their prime disdained the “sellout,” they, eventually, gave that up for the cold world of having to pay the bills. Crosby included.
But the sellouts were always around, no matter how much they were dumped on by those “artists” who were creating “art,” not just content for money. Except that money always had the last laugh. How many, sadly, never really earned anything from their iconic recordings?
The answer to the question? Sugar, by the fake cartoon band, The Archies, derided as cotton candy rock meant to promote a kids TV show. Like the Partridge Family. Or the Monkees, even though they had great songwriters penning their hits.
More and more, though, there’s little left of those acts. 1 Monkee, 2 Beatles, 2 active Stones, 2 active Eagles, though only Don Henley performs regularly with the band. So many more are down to only a few left. All of the original members of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band have died. Time is catching up to all the bands we grew up with. Bands from the 80s and 90s are losing members. We sometimes forget that was 30 an 40 years ago.
In the new Springsteen film, Road Diary, about his latest world tour, postponed because of Covid, illustrated—though it may not have meant to—by showing clips from all the years before, when Bruce was still the wiry guy from Jersey, that though he still loves to put on a show, and how he still has that connection to his audience, he is no longer the Bruce from Thunder Road, or from Dancing in the Dark fame. And if, like me, you remember those days, it can be hard to come to terms with the fact that there may not be too many more 3 hour concerts with the Boss.
And Springsteen is hardly alone.
A whole generation of bands and performers is passing away before our eyes.
And yet, we only really know what they did, for the most part, in their 20s and early 30s. After that? Not really. Which is a shame because you would think that some of them have something important to say about aging in such a youth obsessed business. Those later albums? Rick Beato did a mea culpa recently on his YouTube channel concerning how our brain changes creatively as we age; that we’re not the same at 50 as we are at 20, and had to deal with the blowback:
Which is true.
And while they have names to describe the creative processes at different ages, they tend to give experience and life-lessons short shrift. And yes, bands that had great success early in their lives are sometimes doomed to spent the rest of their performing lives playing songs they wrote decades before, whether that thrills them or not. It’s the business and you have to pay your bills.
Some artists are iconoclasts, Peter Gabriel being one, who will play new stuff whether the audience wants to hear it or not (I know this from an article by a writer in his 40s who whined that Gabriel didn’t play the songs he wanted to hear!) Others, no. The Eagles put out a double-album, Long Road Out of Eden, in 2007. Yet when I went to see them before Glenn Frey died in 2016, they didn’t play any songs from it. And it was a good album, but it suffered from one great flaw—for some: It wasn’t written for people in the early 20s; it was written by men in their 50s. (They did tour for it in 2008, but Henley cites its lukewarm reception as the reason they didn’t write anymore original songs.)
Part of the problem—and this includes me as a songwriter—is the idea that you will either always be innovative in your songwriting, or you will fall into hackneyed cliche that simply regurgitates what you did when your were a true creator. As an old guy, I don’t try to recreate the pathologies that helped me create the songs I did from 1975 to 1991. I’m not that guy anymore, and part of why I took an extended break, among other things, is that I found I was repeating themes and musical ideas. That within me, I had run out of what I found interesting. Everyone hits the wall, moves on. Other sounds, moods, genres interest you.
If you had a lot of early success, you can ride that to finance the rest of your life, regardless of what you produce when you’re older. I’ve mentioned this before, but for all the talk of what the Beatles might have produce had they stayed together, the answer is what they produced as solo artists, because all their solo work can be heard in the songs they featured on their last album, Abbey Road. Now maybe some of the songs would have been more interesting, production-wise, if they had produced them as the Beatles (with or without George Martin), but the songs we still got to hear.
The other problem I have with the young vs. old brain creative talk, is that when you’re older, in your 40s. 50s, and beyond, you see the world so much differently. If you became wildly famous, how can you still write like an impoverished 20 YO struggling to just survive when you have everything materially that you’ll ever want? You can fake it, but you aren’t the same. It’s why they write about being famous; it’s where their at. (It’s why I’m curious how far Taylor Swift can take her fans through her life before they naturally fall away and only care for her early, more famous, songs. Will they stay if she marries, has kids, sings about that?)
All us less famous, or unknown, types don’t carry that ball and chain, but what I write today is reflective of where I am in life and I don’t feel any great need to produce something no one has heard before because that’s probably not possible. Nor am I trying to recreate my youth and its energy. Not that guy anymore and I think it would come off as cringy and fake, or my trying too hard.
Can’t have that.
The problem for listeners is they almost never look to grow old with the performers they loved in their youth. They want to capture a moment from their past, even if only for a few hours. I do it too. But I still try to listen to what all those beautiful young stars are doing now that they’re no longer on the cover of Tiger Beat Magazine or Rolling Stone. Some of it I like; some not so much. You can listen to those who only really know a certain kind of sound and recycle that with different, younger producers, but there’s a sameness to it. Others go in different directions, or play the songs they loved from their youth. And I’ll admit it’s rare that I buy the albums or listen to them often.
But that’s also true of the old stuff.
These days I listen to the musicians I know locally, personally. Maybe it’s because I’m old. Don’t care. It’s what I like. It’s new to me. It’s diverse. Interesting. It’s immediate; fulfilling. And I don’t care if they are old or young; I like that they’re playing it in front of us, even if it’s mostly a small audience, and it’s unlikely they’ll ever be famous.
I’ve outgrown the idea that that’s important.
For fun, this is from my latest, Love Songs and Other Detours. It’s about important stuff, like no matter what life throws at you, there’s nothing better than warm bread right out of the oven.
©2024 David William Pearce
Well said, David.