ELEGANAZA

ELEGANAZA

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TIME MARCHES ON!

by John Mendelssohn

When I was nine and twenty, the four members of the rock group I’d led as a younger sod decided we’d far from gotten our money’s worth out of the extremely foolish-looking sequined overalls we’d had made for us in the last days of our inglorious career, and reunited for a two-night stand at Hollywood’s extremely inglorious Starwood club. We opened, as we always had, with the Move’s “Hello, Susie.” Unlike earlier in our career, when it invariably either headed for the snack bar, continued animated conversations, or shouted, uFog-HAV. Fog-HAV. Fog-HAV.” the audience applauded delightedly. We played one of our originals. Damned if they didn’t applaud again, even more delightedly. “So this is what it should always have been like,” I thought.

And then somebody had to yell, “Too old, John!” and burst my bubble but good.

I’d had my bubble burst before, of course. At the inglorious Whisky a-Go-Go gig with Foghat, for instance, I’d been singing my heart out when two lithe young women in hot pants, skimpy halter tops, ahd platform shoes with live fishes in the nine-inch heels staggered to the edge of the stage, struck seductive poses, and handed me a note. “Oh, God,” I thought, “so this is what rock superstardom’s all about!” and stuck the note down my trousers (they were custom-made and pocketless, you understand). Such was my eagerness to read it, to savor that affirmation of myself as a performer of at least a little sexual charisma, that I didn’t even care that we got no encore at the end of our set (“Fog-HA7! the audience chanted. Fog-HAV. Fog-HAV”). Such was my eagerness to read the note before Big Patti could snatch it from my grasp that I nearly trampled our tiny drummer as I scurried willy-nilly up to our dressing room. Was there a key folded inside, I wondered, or would it provide only a phone number? My heart beat as loudly as the bass drum of whatever record they were playing over the PA as I unfolded it, gasped for breath, and read the words “Get off. We want Foghat.”

But back to our column. If whoever yelled, “Too old, John!” is still around today (that is, if, in punching him in his big mouth, no one’s driven a piece of cartilage from his nose into his brain, killing him), can you imagine how he must be suffering in the face of how utterly commonplace the nearly-middleaged rock ’n’ roll star has become?

Let’s play a game. Right off the tops of our heads, let’s see how many active rock stars in their mid-30s or older we can think of in twenty seconds. Go! Bruce. ZZ Top. Bryan Ferry. The Cars. Lou Reed. Bob Dylan. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers. Jeff Beck. Ozzy. Heart. The Ramones. Kiss. Robert Palmer. Stevie Wonder. Steve Winwood. Aretha Franklin. Genesis. Mark Knopfler. Christine Kerr. Aerosmith. Tina Turner. Peter Gabriel.

As recently as eight years ago you’d wouldn’t have needed the fingers of both hands to count all the over-30 rock stars you could think of in an afternoon.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that the idea of a rock star over 30 was unthinkable. I remember a mid-’60s Los Angeles press conference at which Mick Jagger was asked how long he foresaw the Rolling Stones continuing to perform. “Dunno,” he drawled, in that way he has, “but I can’t see myself singing bloody ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 30.” Everyone snickered, for who could imagine any rock and roller singing anything after about 25? Why, his or her former fans would surely pull him or her from the stage in embarrassment, wouldn’t they?

Speaking of the Stones, for one of rock’s most unflattering depictions of 30, see (that is, hear) “The Spider And The Fly,” a tepid blues on their Out Of Our Heads album that describes a woman whom the narrator obviously regards as a pathetic old harridan as “common, flirty [and looking] about 30.”

So what’s Jerry Hall these days, 29? Of course, the Stones weren’t the only ones who bought the idea of rock after 30 as somehow preposterous—The King himself did too. In his famous 1968 NBC television special, Elvis joked about his inability to cut the rug as he had in his youth. (At the time, of course, he was a third of a decade younger than Bruce Springsteen during a tour in which The Boss performed for 16 straight hours in each of 427 cities. [I don’t have the exact statistics in front of me, you understand.])

There are plenty of more recent examples. It was only 10 years ago, for instance, that then-29-year-old Ian Anderson entitled the last Jethro Tull album of his 20s Too Old To Rock And Roll, Too Young To Die in apparent anticipation of cries of, “Away, old fart!” he expected to start hearing at any second. And Johnny Rotten crammed enough contempt into the first line (“You’re only 29...”) of the Sex Pistols’ “Submission,” to depopulate a medium-sized village.

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Not long after you read this, we pause to note, John(ny Rotten) Lydon will be 31. Elvis Costello’s already 32, the Clash’s Joe Strummer at least 33. Behold how even the most scabrously Angry Young Men of punk and New Wave have ceased, as we all must, to be nearly as young as they used to.

But behold even more attentively that in Britain—whence Wham!, A-Ha, Duran Duran and Culture Club have all emerged at extremely tender ages in recent years —Tony James of Sigue Sigue Sputnik is the oldest-looking pop flavor of the month (that is, current pop sensation) since Gary Glitter.

Even heavy metal, whose audience is predominantly high-school-aged, is dominated by the long of tooth. For every Yngwie Malmsteen in his early 20s or Motley Crue in their mid (mostly—the extremely gifted Mick Mars is said to be well into his 30s), there are a couple of Rob Halfords and Ozzys and Black Lawlesses and Ron Jim Dios, grizzled sods old enough to have fathered about three-quarters of their audiences.

Rock ’n’ roll at first was disposable kids’ music. One was expected, in the music’s early days, to discard his or her entire rock record collection the day he or she turned 19, and to go out and buy something suitable for adult listening, a folk album, perhaps, or Johnny Mathis’s Greatest Hits, or maybe the original cast album of a Broadway musical.

New acts didn’t require much of an investment in those days—men with cigars just herded them into a recording studio, let them sing their hearts out for an hour or two, released the best-sounding track as a single, and hoped for the best. If it flopped, the men with cigars shrugged and said, “So I’m out $158.95. I should kill myself with worry over $158.95?” Then, on the way to the deli for lunch, they discovered three new acts to do the same thing with. If one of them had a hit, they might get booked into a package tour, in which they and 32 other acts would perform for five minutes each, after which they’d promptly be forgotten. Two months later (that is, one month after the, uh, artists had long since returned to the car wash or the faculty of Harvard Law School) disc jockeys would introduce their hit as “an oldie but goodie.”

It took the Beatles and Bob Dylan to transform rock ’n’ roll into rock, something adults could listen to without embarrassment, Dylan by bringing Intelligence and folk music’s Social Awareness (and, let’s face it, sanctimony) to it, the Beatles by striving conspicuously to make Art of it. Which latter meant that making records was no longer a process of dashing into a recording studio, singing one’s heart out for a couple of hours, and dashing back out, but rather of spending ever vaster fortunes. The men with cigars stopped shrugging, for a great, great deal more than $158.95 had come to be involved. With countless tens of thousands on the line, they had to stop thinking of taking the money and running, and to start thinking instead of Building Careers.

Which means that rock ’n’ rollers never retire anymore, or even fade away, but continue to perform well past the age at which the music’s original fans wouldn’t have yelled only, “Hey, pops, get back in your fuckin’ rocking chair,” but, “Hey, gramps, get back, etc.” Bill Wyman, who, in the face of the Stones’ break-up, will reportedly play bass for the Faces on their reunion tour, is widely thought to be at least 51.

In other news, this column has been finding itself appalled on a virtually weekly basis lately by the Associated Press’s reportage on pop figures. First, when the Boy George heroin addiction scandal broke, AP described the old groaner as having been known for his “flowing gowns.” later, when Culture Club sideman Michael Rudetsky was found dead of an overdose in one of George’s houses in early August, it changed its tune, and informed its readers that he had “recently abandoned...frilly skirts.”

If the Associated Press can produce so much as a single photograph of Boy George in either a flowing gown or a frilly skirt, this column will use all its influence to persuade Dave DiMartino, Bill Holdship, and John Kordosh to donate their salaries for the month to a charity of the AP’s nomination.

But the Boy George isn’t even half of it. In its July 21 story on the impending auctioning of a Beatles biographical pamphlet in which John Lennon scrawled notes, the AP underisively observed, “Lennon marked [its pages] with...comments, including one that [a leading British magazine] took as an indication” the group was experimenting with drugs in the 1960s.” Which is to say that, 18 years after the publication of Hunter Davies’ biography, The Beatles, in which they cheerfully admit their use of pot, and 19 after Paul McCartney endorsed LSD in a British magazine interview, it dawned on one of the world’s most trusted news media that the Beatles probably used drugs before their break-up.

If it can’t be trusted to describe Boy George’s wardrobe faithfully or to have known before 1986 that the Beatles used hallucinogens before they broke up, how can the AP be trusted to get matters of huge global import right? Most scary. 0