How old is too old to rock?

And a week or so earlier he stopped by some bar in Farmingdale NJ for a guest appearance with a band called Timepiece.

 

How much intensity does it take to go out there and play a note-for-note version of "Honky Tonk Women" for the 10,000th time?

Physical exertion? Maybe.

But intensity? I think it would take more out of them, mentally and emotionally and intellectually, go play a club tour of old blues standards or something like that.

 

Really? You think musicians don't get up for major performances, like athletes do?

 

Saw Dylan and Neil Young a couple of months ago. Both still rock. Dylan rocks more than he ever did. (raw, spontaneous, more punk than any of the aging punkers)
I saw Superchunk last night. They still rock at 45.
I think the thing that disappears with age is melody writing. In general, the hooks just aren't there anymore with my favorite aging rockers.
The latest Devo may be an exception.

 

Some certainly do. I don't think the Stones fall into that category.

 

Dylan tries way too hard IMO to stay "current" -- he tends to rewrite most of his "standards" in whatever sub-genre is hot at the moment -- speed-metal, punk, grunge, etc etc.

I think he thinks since his voice is totally shot -- and it is, even by his own standards, which were never high on vocal purity even in his prime -- if he just screams/growls/rasps the lyrics behind a wall of screeching thrash guitars, he can still pull it off.

Last time I saw Dylan, 15 or so years ago, I could hardly recognize a single song. And I was, decades ago, a pretty big Dylan freak. I could tell most of the crowd had no fucking clue what ANY of the songs were.

When Dylan came out to play with Bruce on the final encore of the "Rising" tour at Shea Stadium in 2003, they did "Highway 61 Revisited," Springsteen carried the whole fucking song. Dylan was just kind of rasping incoherently into the mike, totally botching the lyrics, etc etc.

I was fairly close to the stage, and although Bruce was obviously having a ball, he did shoot Dylan a couple of weird glances during the song -- the kind of glance you shoot your drunken older brother when he shows up at the family Thanksgiving dinner and vomits all over the turkey.

 

You have combine the "oldness" aspect with the "relevance" aspect when determining when enough's enough.

A friend said just last month that he attended a Styx show and took his 10-year-old son.
They loved it and the music sounded as it did back in the group's heyday.

Stones? They can do whatever they want whenever they want and people will appreciate it.

 

Well, Styx does have a relative young-un doing DeYoung, and its music was never on the same planet as passionate. But no matter the age, you CAN STILL ROCK IN AMERICA

 

The Stones, who I have seen in concert over about a 30-year span, have actually IMO gotten much better onstage in their later years.

In the 70s and 80s they were just churning it out -- Keith seemed disgusted or stoned most of the time and Mick too wrapped up in jumping all over the stage to remember the words or enunciate about 80% of the verses. (They were worse in the 60s, as proven by 'Got Live If You Want It,' one of the worst live -- or simulated 'live' -- albums ever put out by anybody.)

Now in their 60s and 70s, when the Stones play they do a much better job of actually playing the songs. Certainly a lot of it is because they have a much bigger and better group of backing musicians and (gasp) technology, but a lot of it also seems to be that Mick and Keith are actually trying to play the songs in at least recognizable form.

 

"There's carping about us being old men. The fact is, I've always said, if we were black and our name was Count Basie or Duke Ellington, everybody would be going yeah, yeah, yeah. White rock and rollers apparently are not supposed to do this at our age. But I'm not here just to make records and money. I'm here to say something and to touch other people, sometimes in a cry of desperation: 'Do you know this feeling?'"

Keith Richards - 'Life' p546

 

Maybe not, but their shows from what I remember are always high energy, and I'd need to psyche myself up to play in front of 50k or more people repeatedly during a world tour.

 

Phew. I was getting worried there wouldn't be a Night Ranger reference/tweak in here.

As for the subject at hand, I have to admit, I like Grace Slick's bluntness: "All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire." Of course, I might feel the same way too if I was in my mid-to-late 40s and singing the pablum that Starship released in the mid-to-late '80s.