End of era? Legends announce retirement
Still time to catch these acts in concert
Neil Diamond recently stunned music fans by announcing he has Parkinson’s disease and was immediately retiring from touring. But he isn’t the only one retiring.
A number of bands and musicians, including Paul Simon, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Elton John, have recently announced retirement, or at least farewell tours.
Such a spell of retirements might feel like the end of an era, but there’s still a chance to catch these bands in concert.
Paul Simon
Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel first harmonized together in sixth grade, after meeting at school in New York. Together, they’d become a pop music force unlike any at the time, using their dulcet voices to breathe life into delicate tracks like America, Bridge Over Troubled Water and The Sound of Silence.
Simon began to write his own tunes in 1958, according to AllMusic. But it was his 1986 album Graceland, which incorporated music of South Africa with American pop, that became his magnum opus. It’s been listed as a top 100 album by Rolling Stone and Time.
Simon has released 13 solo albums and toured them tirelessly, but last December his guitarist Vincent Nguini died from liver cancer. That’s one reason the 76-year-old songwriter said he’s retiring from touring, the other being that “the travel and time away from my wife and family takes a toll that detracts from the joy of playing,” he said in a statement.
Likelihood of actual retirement: It’s up in the air. Simon said he does “anticipate doing the occasional performance” after his farewell tour. And before announcing his retirement, Simon told the Los Angeles Times he’s “never going to retire” from making music.
■ Where to see him: Homeward Bound — The Farewell Tour begins in Vancouver (May 16) and also lands in Toronto (June 12) and Montreal (June 13).
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd has experienced its fair share of tragedy and success.
Twenty-six of the band’s albums
climbed the Billboard 200 chart, and the over-nine-minute song Free Bird has become a cultural fixture.
In 1977, a plane carrying the band
from Greenville, S.C., to Baton Rouge, La., crashed, killing several members, including frontman Ronnie Van Zant and guitarist Steve
Gaines. Guitarist Gary Rossington is the only founding member still with the band, but heart problems have caused him to cancel shows.
The band calls this its “final” tour on its website.
Likelihood of actual retirement: It seems low. Rossington told Billboard that the band is “just winding it down a little bit” and pointed out that many acts “retire” and then return to the stage.
■ Where to see them: The tour — called The Last of the Street Survivors Farewell Tour in reference to the band’s 1977 record — is slated from May 4 to Sept. 1 and traverses most of the continental U.S. The lone Canadian date is in Toronto on Aug. 11
Ozzy Osbourne
From heavy metal rocker to MTV reality star, Ozzy Osbourne’s had a prolific, and often tumultuous, run. He got his start in Black Sabbath in 1968. His nearly four-decades-long solo career began when he was kicked out of Black Sabbath for allegedly being unreliable. His music was dark, and his shows were wild. At one show in Des Moines, as Rolling Stone recalled, one fan threw a live but unconscious bat on stage. Thinking it was a prop, Osbourne bit the bat’s head off — and had to be rushed to the hospital to be treated for rabies.
So it’s not surprising that he’s retiring from world tours because “I just need to slow it down a little,” as the 69-year-old performer told Rolling Stone.
Likelihood of actual retirement: Pretty unlikely. First, he said “I’m not retiring” from playing one-off gigs, just tours. Second, he supposedly retired from touring in the early 1990s with his farewell “No More Tours.” Osbourne isn’t hiding that fact, though: He named this farewell tour as if it was a sequel, “No More Tours 2.” Where to see him: The tour begins on April 27 and runs through Oct. 13. It covers much of the United States, and its only Canadian stop so far is in Toronto (Sept. 4).
Elton John
Elton John teamed up with lyricist Bernie Taupin in 1967, and the two have dominated pop music since. They have nine No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, where 67 of their tunes landed.
One particular appeal of John was his openness about his personal life, particularly his homosexuality and his longtime addiction to drugs and alcohol. He got sober in the 1990s, at which point he berated himself for not being more active during the AIDS epidemic — so he started the Elton John AIDS Foundation. For both his activism and his music, Queen Elizabeth II knighted John in 1998.
He and his husband, David Furnish, have two sons together, and the 70-year-old pop star says he wants to see them grow up.
“I’ve been touring since I was 17 with various bands. I thought the time is right to say thank you to all my fans and say goodbye,” John told Anderson Cooper, adding that he and Furnish “sat down with their school schedule and we said I’m going to miss too much of this.”
Likelihood of retirement : It’s fairly likely, given that the Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour includes more than 300 shows over three years.
■ Where to see him: The tour spans five continents. Canadian dates include Toronto (Sept. 25 and 26), Ottawa (Sept. 28), Quebec City (Sept. 29) and Montreal (Oct. 4).