by tim howard
This is an open letter to anybody who has ever claimed they’re ‘too old for this’.
Once upon a time, youth was seen as the basic tenet for rock & roll. Its listeners were young rebels, gleeful in the freedoms unfurled by the 50s and expanded on in the 60s. The performers, too, were young and, so we were told, carefree; remember that when the breakup of his band was announced in 1970, George Harrison had only just turned 27.
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On the other hand, though, if we take Chuck Berry’s breakout year of 1956 as the year when music in this specific format, with this specific appeal was born (and that’s born, not conceived; and who else but Berry, the man who did most to assemble the jigsaw pieces around him, to represent it) then in 1970 rock & roll was itself only 14 years old. It was “Almost Grown”. What was to happen when the artists and musicians aged?
Well, evolution, of course, and there’s the whole wide-branching canon we see ahead; Huey Lewis or Siouxsie Sioux; The Walkmen or Patti Smith; Broken Social Scene or Grizzly Bear to name but a limited palette of artists. But that’s beside the point.
What happens when the music of the youth is itself no longer young? And those young figures – the ones that made it to 30, escaped the excess so inherent in their line of work that it’s a cliché? When they realize that their live-fast, die-young themes should be abandoned because they’ve realized that they might not make a pretty corpse any more.
What’s worth noting at this point is that Chuck Berry is still playing. He’s eighty-six, which is a grand age for anybody to be alive, let alone still kicking his trademark pentatonic licks onstage. I just covered a review of Mott the Hoople’s reunion. It’s their forty-year reunion, and it made me surprised that none of the papers over here wanted to suggest how At least one of them was redefining the term “seventies rock”.
We’re in an age where we’ve done much more to looking back and reminiscing. It’s hard to understand whether that suggests complacence with where we’ve reached, culturally, with the preceding decades or if the nostalgia & adoration of almost everything retro is a sign that we have built our times on richer days now long gone. I suppose the latter is slightly shot by the fact that London’s 60s hipster boutiques stocked first world war uniforms.
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What this means, though, is that when Zeppelin or The Who announced their reunions, there was less cruel talk of fossilized remains being resurrected, Spielberg-style from newer DNA. And Mott, certainly, wouldn’t afford such a label: they appeared to just have been put in a space-age hibernation, emerging when they left off only finding that the world around them had changed: the bands are the real-life Buck Rogers in the 21st Century (this is not to say that these bands aren’t aware of their surroundings; The Eagle’s somewhat misguided attempts to talk of climate change in their own reunion album speak volumes of this (probably), whereas Mott’s Ian Hunter’s most recent albums have been filled with the topically aware).
So what’s most surprising is not that these bands are reuniting, but that they’re reuniting now. Why not before? Was the 90s so full of pre-millennial hubris that the past was so entirely forgotten? The first half of the decade, with it’s Brit-pop and its sampling says otherwise. Similarly, why not in the initial after-glowing few years this side of the millennium?
Still, what’s impossible to shake is the realization that it should not take a troupe of, essentially, pensioners to show how to put on a good show. Please understand that this is not my lament for ‘the good old days’. The supposed golden era, ill-defined as it is already, does not need another champion. The current status of music is supposedly awful, and I’d beg to disagree. The good things (ie great sounds by great people) remain good. The bad (label pressure, royalties disputes) were there from the very beginning, and what we have now is merely an exaggeration – a natural evolution – of the way things ‘used to be done’. Music fans have to look harder to find what they want, but they consume more, hopefully legitimately but often not, than ever before and therefore have more delivered to them than was previously possible.
How many albums are in your iTunes, for a start. Thousands? That figures. Now ask your Dad how many he had when he was your age. See?
So it could be supposed that this greater exposure, coupled with the greater backlog to be exposed to, would lend greater weight to these bands and their music. But that wouldn’t fit, now, would it; if we know these tunes better, or at least ones that they remind us of, they should sound less engaging, not more. There’s the comfort in familiarity/frustration at banality argument again…
So what is it? Are these guys all returning as a part of some musical Judgement Day? Now literal rock ‘gods’ here to show kids how to really kick it out? Because surely that’s what Robert Plant used to sing about. Did he expect that they’d be around to live it out? It’s doubtful.
Much of the talk about bands reforming recently has been to do with cynicism. In it for the money, they say, and occasionally perhaps that cynicism is just, but absolutely not always. And little can deflect the boundless joy cascading from the stage off each and every member of Mott the Hoople during every electric second of the gig. They were back, for these brief five nights they were back, and boy were they enjoying it.
The message seemed clear, even if the band themselves didn’t know they were sending it. To all the young dudes of now? Live, be free, do amazing things, and most importantly build on and respect the legacies that these forbears have worked so hard to build up.
And to anyone who feels age creep up on them, then of course times have changed. It doesn’t always mean you should.
