It’s no fun watching rock stars grow old
Music legends morph from champions to chumps
When Elvis Presley died at the age of 42 in 1977, I remember thinking, “So long, you blinkered, baritoned burnout. You had a sweet ride.”
Forty-two, in those days, was ancient for a rock star.
And Elvis had become an ageist punchline long before he toppled off a toilet in his cloistered Graceland mansion, riddled with prescription drugs.
His last Top 10 hit, “Burning Love,” was five years earlier — and that was long after most of his musical peers had flamed out or retired.
Rock, after all, was young people’s music. There was virtually no history. Its earliest stars had barely entered middle age.
The idea of swaggering longhairs in their 60s and 70s seemed unthinkable.
But as the world turns, everything comes full circle. And if you poke your head into the cultural slipstream of today, you’ll find two attempts — one comic, one not — to make the case for aging rockers as righteous warriors in the fight for authenticity.
First up is Ricki and the Flash, a Hollywood fable that stars Meryl Streep as a blowsy bar-band belter who missed her chance at fame and totters around in skin-tight leather like a calcified mummy.
“Do you have a gig tonight?” poses her estranged, razor-tongued daughter. “Or do you always dress like a hooker from Night Court?”
The second is Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll (Thursdays at 9 p.m.), the FX series that stars Denis Leary as a 50-something rock casualty who blew his shot at fame but, with an estranged daughter of his own, clings to the notion he can still have it all. Neither one, alas, is very good. Streep is excellent as a flinty, downon-her-luck survivor at odds with her family, and Leary’s brand of caustic self-deprecation has its share of laughs. But an addiction to formula and relationships that don’t ring true means neither passes the smell test.
Which doesn’t mean there isn’t an intriguing subtext: the tragic sense of aging rockers as outdated and irrelevant as typewriters, VCRs and dialup Internet.
“This is the face of a 50-year-old rock star,” Leary tells his 20-something daughter as the camera pans his wrinkled, pockmarked features.
“A 50-year-old failed rock star,” chimes in his manager. “In cocaine years, you’re like 175.”
And so they lumber around like dinosaurs, festooned in leather and chains, revelling in their outsider status as a kind of noble calling.
Their children hate them — at least initially — they have no money, little education and their worship of aging crustaceans such as Keith Richards is capably mocked by Leary’s TV daughter, for whom the Rolling Stones guitarist is nothing more than a musical punchline.
“He’s a fossil,” she insists, unburdened by nostalgia. “Did you see his ad campaign for Louis Vuitton luggage? Put a handle on his head, he could have been one of the bags!”
But Leary and Streep have an ace
Ricki and the Flash, up their sleeve, a subversive message that undercuts all the smoke and mirrors that come before. A subtext, if you will, to the subtext: rock ’n’ roll can save your soul.
“I’m not writing some Auto-tuned, pop-schlocky Katy Perry bulls---!’’ shrieks Leary, whose defiant integrity overrides the fact he’s an alcoholic, coke-snorting hypocrite. “I’m not selling my soul!”
It’s a nice idea and will placate baby boom audiences who truly believe that, evolution be damned, the only music that matters happened four or five decades ago.
And I’m not saying there aren’t real-life precedents.
Watching Leary and Streep, I kept thinking of Kitchener, Ont., native Brian Vollmer, who flirted with international success in the ’80s as leader of pop-metal band Helix, who found the industry stacked against him and — like Ronald Coleman in Lost Horizon — spent the next three decades doggedly pushing for a second chance.
He’s a hero, in his own way. But high-minded principles have little to do with the jackboot crunch of music economics.
Make no mistake: there are good reasons — other than the narcissistic self-absorption of the millennial generation — why rock stars have morphed from champions to chumps. The industry has changed. Rock — succeeded by populist genres such as hip hop, pop and country — is no longer at the centre of the musical map. In 2015, it’s a niche, like polka, EDM and blue-eyed soul. The days of “four dead in Ohio” and “war, what is it good for?” are long gone. Yes, there’s a glut of female empow- erment anthems by Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, but they’re committee-penned clichés strategically geared to an audience some would argue is already too empowered for its own good. Musicians are loyal corporate soldiers, not agents of social change. Really, who cares what they do? Rock music, as a genre, ran out of gas around the time grunge resurrected punk for a new generation. “Ramones’ songs are like circles,” sums up Slate’s Willa Paskin in her review of Ricki. “The very first person to ever draw one was a genius. Everyone who has done so since is in kindergarten.”
Rock music today is like Big Band music in the ’70s: if you hear it at all, it’s a tribute, a retread or pure nostalgia. That doesn’t negate its power or influence, but as a culturally relevant art form, its day is done.