Artwork by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
The boomer generation has hung onto the remnants of their youth like a terrier shaking a rat. They just won’t let go, unlike members of the Greatest Generation who accepted aging with dignity and aplomb. They didn’t mind sporting beer bellies or fret if their hair was thinning. They thought it was natural, inevitable. They didn’t obsess about maintaining their bodies in the gym or indulge in shaving their heads when thire hairlines retreated. They accepted getting old with very little fuss. Boomers, however, won’t let go of their past, because they believe the sixties was the cultural golden age.
Boomers have always aggrandized their younger days. They still do—and the truth is they probably have a point. After all, it was their generation that protested and, as a result—arguably—caused an early end to the war in Vietnam. They experimented with the mind-blowing and reality shifting frontiers of the counterculture drug scene. They also initiated the sexual revolution and were part of the birth and evolution of rock and roll. (How many insist they were at Woodstock?) They really did change the world and they’re not afraid to let you know it.
But time is merciless. This past week, two music icons from that era passed away. Jeff Beck, one of the most unique and innovative rock guitarists of all time, died suddenly at the age of seventy-eight. Then, only a few days later, David Crosby, one of the funding members of seminal bands The Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, also passed on at the ripe old age of eighty-one. We also lost Christie McVie of Fleetwood Mac. David Bowie, another rock and roll institution and paragon of youthful rebellion, also passed away in 2016 at the relatively young age of sixty-nine.
According to a 2018 article in AARP, (yep, you read that right), Paul Simon, Elton John, Joan Baez, and Neil Diamond all announced they were retiring from touring, but then there are those, like the stalwart Rolling Stones, currently touring in Europe, or Bruce Springsteen, touring this spring, who scoff at early retirement. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are a relatively spry seventy-nine years old and Bruce Springsteen, who is only seventy, just won’t—or can’t—let go.
While boomers are no strangers to seeing musical heroes like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, or Jim Morrison succumb to the excesses of the rock and roll lifestyle, watching their cultural heroes succumb to old age is a whole new ballgame. Even when superstars like Springsteen and The Stones—and in a smaller sense, the surviving members of The Who—defy their age and mount the stage to perform songs they penned fifty or sixty years ago, it’s hard for any of us not to think about how old they—and we—actually are, and how soon our time will be running out.
Many of the boomers I know seem puzzled by some of today’s popular music. Hip hop and rap seem foreign to them. Many dismiss it outright. The days when a band would come on stage dressed in t-shirts and jeans to perform seem to be passe; concerts, except for maybe The Stones and Springsteen, are meticulously choreographed and staged. Rock and roll, pop, and soul have become theatrical events. In many boomers’ eyes, it’s not just about the music anymore. It’s all glitz and flash and commercialized dreck.
This take me back to my teens, where I can still hear cries of, “Turn that crap down!” or “How the hell can listen to that garbage?” When Elvis Presley was labeled as a sexual menace and banned from TV, and The Beatles’ records being burned because of John Lennon’s comment that the band was more popular than Jesus Christ, and Jim Morrison arrest for public lewdness after a show were emblems of honor for rebellious teens. These were our boomer heroes, flaunting their contempt for a strait-laced and banal (usually suburban) existence. How many boomers hear these echoes from the past when they criticize the non-musicality of rap or the blandness of today’s pop? It’s hard to face the truth. They—we—have become our parents.
There is nothing unnatural or perverse about this process. The baton must be passed. The guard must be changed. As much as boomers cling to what was one of the greatest eras in the cultural history of our country, that time is gone—just like the glory days of our dissolute youth. When a Jeff Beck or a David Crosby or a Christie McVie or a David Bowie, when one of these brilliant paragons of innovation and imagination pass from the now into the past (the recent past, they refuse to fade from youthful memories), that golden time fades a little bit farther away.
I’m in my sixties now. I was alive during Woodstock, although I didn’t go (I was only twelve) and have fond memories of listening to hits like “Light My Fire”, “Incense and Peppermints”, “Eve of Destruction”, “Red Rubber Ball”, and “My Generation” on my plastic portable transistor radio, which was (oddly enough) proportioned very much like today’s smartphones. We did have some excellent music. But time is catching up. Even though I can still remember some of those songs note for note or word for word, the feeling of that time—except in the faint shadows in my memory and in the fading echoes of those LPs—is gone for good.
I’ve been to see Yes, The Grateful Dead, The Who, Bruce, REM, U2, and many, many, more bands. I did not see Jeff Beck, Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Fleetwood Mac, or The Byrds—although I did see Roger McGuinn on a solo tour. I also have not seen the Rolling Stones—although I still have a chance on that one.
In the immortal words of Neil Young, “Hey hey, my my/Rock and roll will never die” or Pete Townsend’s “Long Live Rock”, the essence of that era will probably be with us for all time. Which is a good thing. Some phenomenal music came out of the sixties and seventies and deserves to live on. But it won’t be the same without us there to listen to it, to remember how it affected our world.
Fifty years from now, when all survivors of the sixties are gone, and the names Jeff Beck and David Crosby will be footnotes in an encyclopedia somewhere, we’ll be gone, six feet under, pushing up daisies, because, as you know, all we are is dust in the wind.