Coming to terms with loss at Grammys
The Grammy Awards will be live in all time zones for the first time ever Monday on CBS, with big names like Kendrick Lamar, Taylor Swift and the Weeknd vying for the major awards.
We can only guess who’ll win at this point, but one thing everyone knows for certain is that one of the major highlights of the 58th annual Grammy Awards will be the In Memoriam segment, the annual photo montage honoring performers and other notable members of the music industry who have died in the past year.
Over the past few months — the past several weeks, in particular — we have lost an alarming number of rock, pop and R&B icons. There is something jarring about the succession, the rapidness with which the world is losing the
58th Annual Grammy Awards: 5 p.m. Monday on CBS. Keep up to beat with live updates and commentary from Chronicle staff writers with our live blog. Sign up now at http://bit.ly/SFGrammys, and join the discussion online when the show starts. architects of popular culture.
When the mournful music cues up sometime in the middle of the 58th ceremony, we will see the faces of everyone from B.B. King to Jefferson Airplane’s Paul Kantner, to Natalie Cole to Lemmy Kilmister of Motörhead. David Bowie will get his very own tribute from Lady Gaga, fresh from her performance of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. And Jackson Browne will join members of the Eagles, including Don Henley, to remember their bandmate, Glenn Frey.
Viewers will also bid adieu to Ben E. King; Scott Weiland; Allen Toussaint; Toto’s Mike Porcaro; Ornette Coleman; Dan Hicks; Tower of Power’s Mic Gillette; Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire; and Signe Toly Anderson, Jefferson Airplane’s original singer who died on the same day as Kantner, among many others.
Dying of natural causes
The names above constitute a large, unwieldy cross-section of genres, decades and work, but the sense of loss is the same. These are the people who taught us how to dress, how to walk, how to live our lives — and they’re disappearing.
“What it says is that we’re getting further and further away from that magical generation of musicians,” says Dennis McNally, rock historian and former Grateful Dead publicist. “That’s going to stop you in your tracks and make you ponder things.”
For Baby Boomers, McNally says, the deaths hit especially hard.
“Rock and roll was one of the fundamental, central aspects of our lives,” he says. “For these people to die, it’s almost a way of keeping time for us.”
There are logical reasons for the seemingly sudden rash of deaths. Even without chronic alcohol or drug use, the life of a touring musician can be incredibly stressful. Sleep patterns are off, it’s almost impossible to eat well and performing onstage night after night is physically cruel.
Making it past the 27 Club — artists including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse all died at the age of 27 — is a feat in itself.
The bigger concern is that we’re entering an era where the artists who survived the years of overindulgence, abuse and rough nights on the tour bus are now reaching the age when people succumb to everyday ailments.
Bowie had cancer. Kantner was taken out by septic shock. White suffered from Parkinson’s disease.
“Now we’re talking about people dying of natural causes,” says Greil Marcus, the author of “Mystery Train” and lecturer at UC Berkeley. “Not because they took too many drugs or didn’t eat right — just because people who did interesting things 30 or 40 years ago have reached a certain age. It’s going to be a wipeout, as a natural matter.”
Markedly different world
It’s sobering to think that these larger-than-life personalities that we all grew up with are human after all. Their deaths don’t simply require us to consider our own mortality, but to face a world that will be dramatically different without their presence.
“I think the reason it feels difficult is because so many of these people continue to perform and produce music into their golden years,” says Ann Powers, NPR Music’s critic and correspondent. “Bowie took a long time off but he was in the middle of a resurgence. It’s hard to think about someone who’s producing such vibrant work leaving us. Paul McCartney is vigorous. He’s playing huge stadium tours. He’s making new music. How can you ponder someone like that not
being with us?
“Mick Jagger, too,” she adds. “When Taylor Swift played in Nashville, they performed ‘Satisfaction’ together and I turned to my husband and said, ‘How can that be real? I know people in their 30s who can’t keep up with him.’ When there’s that much life it’s devastating to think of losing that life.”
Appreciating the living
Many of these artists have been admired and loved by several generations, with their music staying current even as their bodies age.
“David Bowie had fans of every conceivable age,” Marcus says. “People continued to discover him throughout his career. They heard something. They saw a picture. They said, ‘I want to be like that,’ or, ‘He makes me feel unashamed of who I am.’ ”
That may explain why the deaths of people like Bowie and Kilmister inspired such an outpouring of emotion from all corners, on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
“The interesting thing is when I was a teenager in the ’60s listening to the Stones and the Beatles, very few people were listening to music from 40 years earlier,” says Randy Lewis, pop music critic for the Los Angeles Times. “But we’re still listening to those bands even though Lady Gaga and Katy Perry have come along. The music of the earlier rock generations has managed to stay current.”
If anything, the deaths give us an excuse to better appreciate the artists who are still with us. Even though many of the acts who will appear in the Grammys In Memoriam segment made their greatest artistic contributions decades ago (B.B. King’s “Singin’ The Blues” is still out there to knock your socks off ), the world isn’t the same without their physical presence.
“We’re the poorer for not being able to go catch a Jefferson Starship show with Paul Kantner,” says McNally. “There’s a fundamental difference between live music and recorded music. There’s just something that happens when you’re listening to something, in real time, that’s being created in front of you.”
There is a movement under way on social media where friends are urging each other to honor the elders who are still standing, whether by posting YouTube clips or catching a live show — a backlash, if you will, to people pouring out their sorrow when someone goes.
“I urge people, pick a musician over 60 and go see them live,” McNally says.
Reality feels unnatural
Marcus agrees. “If Bryan Ferry comes out 20 years from now when he’s 90 and really can’t do anything more but sit at the piano and sing in a soft voice, I would bet the songs he sings will sound different in the best way,” he says. “They will have a complex set of emotions that weren’t there before. He will still be discovering those songs and the possibility of the feeling and idea that are in those chords and melody and words. That’s lovely.”
It could be the one good thing to come out of the torrent of death — a reminder that we should cherish what we have, to treasure the mavericks before we have to mourn them.
“We’re all reeling a bit because even though we could have anticipated this moment, it feels unnatural,” Powers says. “The music is so omnipresent in our lives. It feels like when the people who created it die, the music dies.”