I wrote some months ago (years, even) about how rock and roll was a young man’s game.
And I still think I was largely right. You just have to look at the song-writing careers of the greatest rock stars of the 20th century to see how hard it has been for them to write good songs after they turned 40.
Paul McCartney is probably the greatest songwriter in the history of popular music. But can you think of a single good song he has written since the 1980s? Forget about Eleanor Rigby or any of his Beatles classics. Has he written anything in the league of Band On The Run or Live And Let Die?
So it is with the Rolling Stones. Their last great rock song was probably Start Me Up which started out as a reggae tune they recorded in the 1970s. After that, it has been largely downhill.
Even Elton John, who belongs to the next generation of rock stars, has not written a good song since Sacrifice, which came out over two decades ago. Nearly everything else he has written since then has been forgotten.
But while rock and roll songwriting may be a young man’s game, was I generalizing too much when I said that all of rock depended on youth? After all, the Stones are back on tour. So are The Who. Robert Plant never stops touring. Neither does Bob Dylan. So are we right to sneer at these old guys when they strap on their guitars?
I’m not so sure any longer. I’ve been watching footage of 20th century rock stars like the Stones and Clapton performing with the great bluesmen who had inspired them – men like Muddy Waters – and rock and roll greats like Chuck Berry. The White guys on the stage were younger but all the Black people were way above 70. And yet, who was to say that they did not know how to rock?
So I thought about it. James Brown (soon to be the subject of a movie) was 73 and still performing when he died. The great Tina Turner must be 75 now. Stevie Wonder, the baby of the bunch – literally; he began performing as a child star – is in his mid-60 now (and only three years younger than Elton John), and yet, nobody thinks there is anything odd about his performing his greatest hits on stage.
| "That focus on youth and all that made-up nonsense about the counter-culture, has come back to haunt the rock stars of the Sixties and Seventies." |
Could it be that when we say that rock stars should retire when they are still young, we are being subliminally racist? Do we load White performers with the sorts of expectations that Black people are exempt from?
Perhaps we do. And that’s odd. Because all of the great Black stars who laid down the foundation for today’s rock were already quite old by the time the White boys who imitated them began writing their best material. Muddy Waters was nearly 60 and still performing when the Stones were writing Angie or It’s Only Rock and Roll. Big Bill Broonzy, a major influence on rock had died in 1958, long before White boys took to his music. But here’s the thing: he died in his 70s, still writing and playing.
So why do we judge White rock stars differently? My guess is because they made one important move at the height of their careers that made them seem different from the Black guys.
When James Brown performed, you didn’t have to know why he was unhappy: he was a Black man in racist American. In those days, segregation was so widespread in America that Black people could perform in big city clubs in so-called White areas but could be lynched if they dared sit in the audience at the same club and halls.
Much of their music stemmed from protest and sadness. But White boys in 1960s America and England had little to complain about. So they decided to claim that they were protesting against the adult establishment and its social mores. They claimed that theirs was the music of youth. “Hope I die before I grow old” sang The Who in My Generation (which the shameless old codgers still perform!) and in Performance, the only decent movie Mick Jagger has been in, James Fox, playing a gangster tells the Jagger character (who is a rock star), “You’ll look ridiculous when you are 40”.
That focus on youth and all that made-up nonsense about the counter-culture, has come back to haunt the rock stars of the Sixties and Seventies. They should have focused on the music. Instead they focused on sham rebellion. And now, when they continue to perform at their advanced age, they look like charlatans.
Their idols, on the other hand, never dared protest openly. (They would have been lynched.) And so now, when the Stones play Love in Vain, we think of them as youth icons gone to seed. Instead, we should think of the great Robert Johnson (born 1911), who actually wrote the song!
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