Unplug the oldies - for good

Mick, Keith, Bob, Patti... what is this colostomy rock? It's not about rebellion, let alone youth. It's the antithesis of rebellion: it's nostalgia. And nostalgia is the death of rock
It's the autumn of 1999. Mike Doughty and I are looking at a photo of his toiletries in the current issue of Teen People magazine. Doughty was the founder/ singer/songwriter of the 1990s band Soul Coughing, a hip-hoppy rock band that made some successful records and toured extensively between 1993 and their break-up in the spring of 2000. That made Doughty a bona fide rock star. I knew him before he was famous, back when he was a young doorman at the Knitting Factory, the avant-garde music space in downtown Manhattan, and writing about music for the paper I edit, New York Press . He's young enough to be my son, a Nineties kind of guy to my grizzled Sixties old-timer.

Doughty and I were looking at this article together, and I was trying to explain to him that while I thought it was great for him to be a teenybopper sex object when he was still in his twenties, I really didn't want him up on stage in his fifties, in the 2020s, fronting a session band pretending to be Soul Coughing, wheezing his 1999 hit single, 'Circles' for the umpteen-thousandth time, for a nostalgic crowd of middle-aged lawyers and stockbrokers who've broken out their old baseball caps and worn them backward just for the occasion.

Why? Because rock is youth music. It is best played by young people, for young people, in a setting that is specifically exclusionary of their parents and anyone their parents' age. It is the music of youthful energies, youthful rebellion, youthful anxieties and anger. 'Unlike every other great genre of American pop,' American rock historian James Miller concurs, 'rock is all about being young, or (if you are poor Mick Jagger) pretending to be young.'

Rock simply should not be played by 55 year-old men with triple chins wearing bad wighats, pretending still to be excited about playing songs they wrote 30 or 35 years ago and have played some thousands of times since. Its prime audience should not be middle-aged, balding, jelly-bellied dads who've brought along their wives and kids. It should not be trapped behind glass in a museum display and gawked at like remnants of a lost civilisation. That is not rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is not family entertainment. The Rolling Stones are only the most obvious, and perhaps depressing, example of a once-great rock band that kept playing years and years after they'd gotten too old, had gone from the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world to the greatest self-parody of a rock'n'roll band.

The Rolling Stones didn't make rock anymore after the mid-Seventies; they made stadium events. By the 1990s, the Stones' brand of colostomy rock had become not an isolated freak show but a regular - and popular - feature of the summer concert season. Every year, ancient rock bands rise up from their graves and rule the nights again. Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jethro Tull, Yes, the Allman Brothers: pale ghosts of their youthful selves, they have become their own nostalgia merchandise. There can be only one motivation: as the Rutles declared, 'All You Need Is Cash'.

I find this terribly dispiriting. When Eddie Van Halen needs to be careful how he moves onstage because of his hip replacement surgery, Eddie should sit down and become strictly a studio musician. When bands calling themselves Little Feat or Jefferson Starship are made up almost entirely of ringers and replacements and include none of the talents that originally made those names so recognisable, they should stop calling themselves Little Feat or Jefferson anything. When Pete Townshend decides in his mid-fifties that he wants to record a six-CD rock opera (Lifehouse) made up entirely of songs he wrote 30 years ago, the best of which he and his band already played to death during the 1970s ('Baba O'Riley', 'Behind Blue Eyes', 'Won't Get Fooled Again'), and that he is now going to rerecord in wimpy old-man's versions, with insipid string orchestrations laid on top for a false air of gravity... someone should say, 'No, Pete, that's a bad idea' and lead him by the elbow back to the old folks' home - where Eddie, Mick, and the rest of the geezers might have a good laugh and remind him of the lyrics to a certain song he wrote decades earlier, famously addressing precisely this topic of ageing.

But no. Instead, Pete 'reunites' one more time with what's left of The Who, sans Keith Moon - and really, what's The Who without Keith Moon? - and they go creaking off on another greybeards' tour of the States. Here comes the new one, not quite the same as the old one.

Neil Young, Graham Nash, the grizzled and addled Stephen Stills, and the rotund and liver-transplanted David Crosby gathered for a CSNY reunion tour in 2000. Even Rolling Stone, which had functioned for years as a CSNY fanzine, was reduced to praising their ragged vocal performances and ghastly physical appearance in terms so hollow, so un-musical, that only the most naive reader could fail to scan the truth between the lines. (Rolling Stone put Crosby on its cover yet again that year, not for any musical achievement but for his Frankensteinian love-child arrangement with Melissa Etheridge, an affirmative-action rock mediocrity better known for her lesbianism than for any musical talent.) Didn't any of these people see Spinal Tap?

In principle, no one can argue against the abundant evidence that middle-aged people make sad spectacles of themselves when they think they're 'rocking out'. It's when you start listing specific rockers and bands that the fights break out, because everyone has a special favourite or two who they think are the exceptions. By 'everyone' I mean, of course, my fellow baby boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964 who grew up in 'the rock years'. If you're in that group I can almost guarantee I can push one of your personal-hero buttons with a very short list of washed-up has-beens who should have stopped performing long before they did. I am now going to say rude things about some performers the reader may hold dear.

Were you, for instance, a Fleetwood Mac fan? I never quite got their massive appeal myself. To me, Fleetwood Mac - the mid-to-late-1970s edition of Fleetwood Mac, 'Rhiannon' and all that - was just Abba with a decent drummer. Be that as it may, if you were a fan of Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s, why on earth would you want to see them reunited as middle-aged has-beens in the late 1990s, performing a nostalgia stage act of 25-year-old hit songs? How could you look at the once-svelte Stevie Nicks and not cringe to see her overweight and stuffed like a sausage into some girdle or corset torture device so constricting she literally could not move in it, her pancake make-up thick and hard as china, her hair a straw fright wig, her once fetchingly crackled voice a scary croak?

Or how about the middle-aged Eric Clapton? Were you still thinking Clapton was God by, say, 1980? How about after the easy-listening Miller Beer commercials? How about after his son died and he wrote that hideously mawkish song for him and then would not stop playing it everywhere he went, year after year?

Peter Gabriel is a Seventies rocker I once idolised. To me, Phil Collins was never anything but the drummer in Peter Gabriel's band, and Genesis without Gabriel was as much an imponderable as the Who without Keith Moon, or the Pogues without Shane. Then I saw the fiftysomething Peter Gabriel singing the theme song to Babe: Pig in the City at the Academy Awards ceremonies that year. Grey and concentrically rounded as a Botero figure, he sang 'That'll Do, Pig' and I wondered for a second if he was addressing himself at the dinner table.

Patti Smith is another name angry boomers throw at me when I'm making the case for rock as youth music. My version: Patti Smith was one of the least talented posers in rock: everything bad and pretentious about the union of punk and poetry in one self-conscious package. Patti Smith was already, by my standards, a little long in the tooth to be making credible rock music by the time you and I first heard her. I was in my mid-twenties at that point and feeling a little too old even to be listening to punk rock, and she was a few years older than me. A 30-year-old 'punk rock poet-priestess'? It seemed a stretch to me then, and the longer she stuck around, the farther the stretch.

When she disappeared from public view, you might have thought that at least she was showing the good grace to get out before she descended into complete self-parody. And then, years later, she made the inevitable rock-star 'comeback' when approaching 50, an age at which rock stars should be, by man's or natural law, dead or retired. She looked haggard and wan after years of widowhood and housewifery, and she put out a series of records of descending listenability. Gung Ho, released in 2000, was a terrible record. It sounded like a Saturday Night Live parody of the kind of record a 50-year-old Patti Smith might make. Her voice sounded flat and listless as damp laundry,a kind of vocal appliqué glued onto the surface of prerecorded tracks, which had given up sounding even remotely like rock, let alone punk rock, and were instead the kind of anonymous, adult-oriented global pop sound other aged former rockers, like Gabriel and Sting, had by then adopted as a pillowy cushion for their own increasingly de-energised vocals.

I could go on...The freak-show fiftysomething versions of once-respectable bands like Little Feat creaking onto the stages of open-air summer concert venues around the globe; the cross-generational exercises in tedium that were Neil Young's collaboration with Pearl Jam and Jimmy Page's with the Black Crowes; the Blondie comeback (fat, frazzled, barely wheezing out her 25-year-old hit singles); Chrissie Hynde stumping for Peta; the never-ending phenomenon of Bruce Springsteen; the return of the middle-aged Sex Pistols; the crotchety and droning Lou Reed; Bowie, Bono, Prince (almost as bizarrely eccentric and vain as Michael Jackson); the deathless and ever more inappropriately named Beach Boys; and, of course, Dylan. These are all examples my middle-aged friends have tossed at me to counter my argument that people their age have no business onstage. If you think any of them are holdouts from the has-beens brigade, I can only say you're not hearing them as they are now, you're hearing them as you want to remember them. Colostomy rock is not rebellion, it's the antithesis of rebellion: it's nostalgia. And nostalgia is the death of rock. We were supposed to die before we got old. Now look at us. Woo woo, Mick! Rock on, Bruce!

But this is not just about getting old. No one has the right to tell Stevie Nicks or Deborah Harry she can't relax a little about her weight. No one can tell Gabriel he shouldn't grow grey and sleekly fat as Sebastian Cabot if he has a mind to. But you could certainly make the case that rock stars should not do those things. Obviously, rock grew old along with those who made it - and, more to the point, along with its biggest market, the baby boomers. Who doesn't get old, besides dead rock stars? My argument is not against ageing, it's for ageing gracefully. Plenty of people know how to do this, but rock stars, like movie stars, find it extremely difficult, and I suspect for the same reason: they have a pathological-professional need to continue to pretend they're young and sexy long after they've become neither. It's not about age so much as it is about the pretence of youth. Nobody says a word about old poets, jazz musicians, or tango dancers. If Mick Jagger wants to sit on a stool at the Blue Note and croak de blooz with Keith on an acoustic guitar, I wouldn't say a word. It's Mick butt-shaking and pretending to be really into 'Satisfaction' for the millionth time that's unseemly.

Were we always so easily lied to by our rock stars? If so, what does this say about us as a generation? 'We won't get fooled again'? Hell, were we fooling ourselves all along?

Of course, rock was a commercial enterprise from its start. But, as Ellen Willis, one of the first and best female rock critics in the Sixties, put it to me, back then rock was something some young people shared, intently, to the exclusion of everyone non-rock. It was 'like a generational language. You could play a song for somebody and they understood all sorts of things about you. And what we understood was that we were somehow different'. Rock was the soundtrack of change. We may not all have gone so far as John Sinclair, manager of the 'revolutionary' rock band the MC5 and founder of the White Panther Party, did when he wrote 'our music and our culture constitute a political force, the cultural revolution is inseparable from the political revolution, and the revolutionary potential of our culture cannot be fully realised as long as the capitalist social order continues to exist'.

But if rock turned out not to be a very useful aesthetic weapon of the revolution, if listening to rock music alone did not trigger sweeping political change - though perhaps it did stimulate in some young people the urge, effervescent and inchoate, to cause sweeping political change - at the very least there were some sweeping changes in attitudes that rock helped to promote at the time, and they were attitudes regarding some fundamental aspects of society and culture.

So of course the MC5 and Jefferson Airplane ended up selling out. Of course Mick Jagger was never a 'Street Fighting Man'. He went to an antiwar demonstration or two, same as everybody else, and it was the height of cynical, radical-chic appropriationism for him to pretend that he really thought the time was right for violent revolution. And yet maybe that song itself, having left Mick's hands and worked its way around the globe served some purpose as a rebellious anthem, some purpose beyond making Mick Jagger a richer man than he already was. At best one might argue that, through the Sixties, rock's impact as an indirect agent of change was not always hampered by its blatant commerciality; that, in fact, the mainstream entertainment industry, by mass-marketing rock through records, radio, TV, and live appearances, actually helped spread countercultural ideas and rebellious attitudes to receptive young people everywhere.

Youth rebellion developed momentum and cultural clout in the Sixties and Seventies, when the tsunami of baby boomers flooded through the high schools and colleges. Whereas some Fifties teens might have felt alienated from their parents, many Sixties and Seventies teens were downright alien to them. It was in this period that sociologists began to identify 'youth culture' as a potentially subversive subculture, existing within but at odds with the larger culture. Indeed, between the long hair, the drugs, the rock, the free love, the pacifism, the no-work-ethic embrace of poverty, the flirtations with eastern mysticism, and the radical politics, a subset of young people in the Sixties came to be identified as inhabiting a completely separate culture from that of their parents and other, 'straight,' youth: the counterculture, the 'freek nation'. This was more than kids in black leather acting like hood lums on the streets; this was a generation, or part of a generation, in what seemed to be open revolt.

Does every generation start out wanting to change the world and simply lose the energy and vision? Is it just a function of having responsibilities and rebellious children of your own? Or is there something particular about the failure of my generation to carry out the revolution it once promised itself? It can be argued that the movers and shakers of rock were always exemplars of hip capitalism, paying empty lip service to social change and 'the revolution' but always far more focused on money and glamour and personal gratification. No amount of revolutionary signifying by Rage Against the Machine, no display of lumpen solidarity by Bruce Springsteen, no number of charity benefit performances by Sting and Jackson Browne can disguise how establishment rock became, decades ago. An industry that has made millionaires of its more savvy stars (Jagger, Bowie, Springsteen) and billionaires of its more ruthless businessmen (David Geffen) can hardly be expected to Fight the Power.

Can something very similar be said for my generation at large? I think it can. The revolutionaries of 1968 grew up, grew fat, grew complacent, withdrew from the world, and beguiled themselves with their own trivia. We went from Be Here Now to Remember When. This is not the revolution we thought we were going to make.

Extracted from John Strausbaugh's Rock Til You Drop, published by Verso on 23 August (£16). To order this book for the special price of £14, call Observer CultureShop on 0870 066 7989.

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