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It’s a paper ticket, from before the age of the QR code, and it announces the Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium on Saturday 26 June 1982. I was 15, but I still remember the buildup to that show – the papers full of jokes about the band needing Zimmer frames to reach the stage and, perhaps, more frequent bathroom breaks. They called them “the Strolling Bones”. On that day, Mick Jagger was 38 years old.

The joke turned on the notion that rock’n’roll was the music of the young. It had arrived in the mid-1950s in an eruption of hormones and rebellion, its themes teenage lust, longing and a future that stretched ahead, vast and mysterious. For men knocking 40 still to be singing of such things seemed ridiculous. And yet, the Stones were back last summer, Jagger approaching his 80th birthday, playing all the same songs.

All this struck me on Thursday night, when I stood in a summer crowd of 65,000 to see Bruce Springsteen, who is 73, play a three-hour set in London’s Hyde Park. A similar thought had crossed my mind when a record TV audience watched Elton John, 76, perform at Glastonbury, for what he said would be his last UK show. And, again, when I visited the National Portrait Gallery to see a new collection of photos depicting the earliest years of the Beatles, the pictures taken by Paul McCartney, who is 81. Rock’n’roll, an artform created by and for the young, has existed for the span of a human life. Its greatest practitioners were once the embodiments, and laureates, of youth – and now they are old.

The tension between those two facts is what the headline writers were poking at four decades ago. The generation that hoped to die before they got old, that vowed never to trust anyone over 30, passed both those landmarks long ago.

For some artists, the response has been to seek to defy the years, to run up the downward escalator, and somehow return, if not to the state of being young, to a simulation of it. Jagger is the exemplar, his 2022 performances “extraordinary in a zoological way” as the writer Sarfraz Manzoor told me, audiences marvelling at the mere fact that a human of his age can look and move like that.

But what I saw on Thursday was a very different response. Springsteen is also in remarkable shape: fit, toned and bursting with vitality. He can still toss a guitar in the air; he can still rip open his shirt to reveal a bare chest, though now the gesture comes with a wink of self-deprecation at the absurdity of it. But he does not look like a man desperate to recapture his glory days. He is not, as Manzoor – whose boyhood devotion to Springsteen was depicted in the movie Blinded By the Light – says of Jagger, “perpetually stuck in his 20s”.

On the contrary, this new show of Springsteen’s looks ageing and death in the eye. His bandmates are his contemporaries and don’t hide it: the giant monitors show closeups of gnarled, veined hands on guitar strings. His own performance is astonishing, but it never looks effortless. He speaks only once at any length, and that is to introduce a 2020 song about the band he played in with schoolmates when he was 15. He is, he tells the crowd, the only one left. “Death is like you’re standing on the railroad tracks with an oncoming train bearing down upon you,” he says. “But it brings a certain clarity of thought.” It pushes you to “seize the day”, to savour, with urgency, the time and the people you have left. And then he plays Last Man Standing, a song about the passions of youth, the time in your life when “it’s all hellos”, before they are outnumbered by “hard goodbyes”.

The result is that you hear the rest of the songs through fresh ears. Now it doesn’t sound absurd to hear a septuagenarian singing of childhood best friends running on the Backstreets, or of young sweethearts Born to Run, itching to break free of their small town. Now the joy and exuberance of those classic songs carries the extra poignancy of reminiscence and loss. And the two sets of emotions don’t fight each other. Instead, they make each other stronger – the Glory Days only more glorious because we know they are fleeting.

“It’s an amazing act of transubstantiation,” Eric Alterman, author of a study of Bruce Springsteen, tells me. On stage, the singer becomes the 26-year-old he once was, while fully remaining the 73-year-old he now is. And the magic works on the audience. Watching the show, says Alterman, “I’m inhabiting my 15-year-old self, and the 63-year-old man I am today – and all the years in between.”

This is what rock’n’roll, ageing in real time and before our eyes, can do. “Nostalgia” doesn’t quite capture it, with its hint of the doomed attempt to revive a vanished youth. Instead, standing in a crowd singing songs you’ve known for ever is an invitation to reflect on, and cherish, a whole life: the performer’s, but also your own.

That is what I hear in Joni Mitchell’s album of songs recorded in a voice several registers deeper than the one that first wowed millions. It’s also in Tom Jones (finally) letting his hair turn white and singing the words “when I’m dead”, urging that we remember that he had “One hell of a life”. It’s in McCartney recording an album called Memory Almost Full, with one track on it named The End of the End. It’s in that Glastonbury crowd singing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road to an Elton John who seems as constant a fixture in their – our – lives as Elizabeth II once was.

Of course, artists have always contemplated time and mortality. But they did not do so in a medium forged in the worship of youth. Yes, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen confronted death in their music, even before they grew old, but they were always in a slightly different business: as Alterman says, they weren’t writing songs to dance to.

Now a form that revered the first bloom is embracing the falling of autumn leaves, preparing even the youngest fans for a future that contains, yes, all kinds of unknown possibilities, but also an end point we know too well. After the encores, one banger after another, Springsteen closed his show with a song that promised that “When all our summers have come to an end / I’ll see you in my dreams”. The sun had set by then, and it felt like the sweetest goodbye.

Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

Just gotten a Billy Gibbons 2023 gig off Dime and frankly the guy should retire.

The good thing is a poor guitarist like me is on par with Billy’s current guitar skills... stumbling through pentatonic scales? Yes I can too.

Rock and roll is dead blah blah blah.
Buy a ticket to see Whiskey Meyers and quit your fckng crying.

I saw Skynyrd in 1976 and these guys would smoke them.
Hand wired plugged straight in les Paul rock and roll gets the best of us all.

Rock n Roll's not going away . It's just not mass market in the way that it was and much of it goes under the radar.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-07-08 11:19 by Spud.

Quote
Spud
Rock n Roll's not going away . It's just not mass market in the way that it was and much of it goes under the radar.

Absolutely- I mentioned this band called Whiskey Meyers in my previous post.
apparently a point of pride for them is Mick hand picked them to open a show in Chicago.
Fans who saw them didn’t think much of it, some group wailing away while we ignore them waiting for showtime.

I’ve seen them on a couple of occasions, this band is un-fvckng believable.
Coming from someone who has seen the Allman Bros and as I mentioned Skynyrd and this is next level shit.and it’s like they don’t exist in mainstream.
They’re probably multi-millionaires from touring constantly selling out shows to 10 or 20,000 people,more than many,many bands in the 1970s yet in the public conscience they don’t exist. We live in strange times.

I don't see the article is stating that rock and roll is dying. More like that the music that once declared and defined itself so self-consciously as young's music is still here played and listened by the very same people. It's been a helluva journey for anyone involved - no one would have imagined that some half a century later all this is still happening. And yeah, they are pretty old, these pioneers - the artists and their fans - who have devoted their whole life into music they fallen love with in their teens, and they might vanish soon, not the music form itself.

But yeah, this is a pretty 'classic rock' stance. To an extent it is justified, since back then rock music really was a voice of generation, a mass movement among the kids that shaped the culture. Jagger described some years ago nicely the situation of the genre nowadays. He says that it is like jazz in his youth, exciting in itself, but belongs to the circles of some devoted ones. To me that sounds like it has found its 'natural place' among other genres, being nothing but a musical genre, and can live and develope within its boundaries forever. Like jazz do.

Probably Jagger - the sharpest eye in business with the least pretensions - put it aptly ages ago: It's Only Rock'n'Roll But I Like It..

- Doxa



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2023-07-08 12:31 by Doxa.

Quote
Doxa
... To me that sounds like it [RNR] has found its 'natural place' among other genres, being nothing but a musical genre, and can live and develop within its boundaries forever. Like jazz does...

Probably

- Doxa

That sums it up perfectly.

It's much too dependent on personification, the artists public image, the idolization to survive as an art form on its own merit. The Blues would be a different story but had no mainstream popularity in the first place.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-07-08 12:53 by Nikkei.

Well I don't think that the desire amongst a fair few young folks to make loud raucous guitar music is going away any time soon.

..and that's all this "art form" needs in order to survive.

Interesting article, it's the Guardian after all.

He has a point, The Boss vs The Stones (well Mick mostly) I for one feel like I'm 13 again like when I first got into them when I see them live, not "“I’m inhabiting my 15-year-old self, and the 63-year-old man I am today – and all the years in between.” and I LIKE IT !

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It makes me physically sick to think of other members of the Stones passing away. We all know that nothing lasts forever and we console ourselves, remembering what a magnificent ride it's been, all of those moments from all of those shows..and it's NOT over yet, but just the thought of not looking forward to something Stones related is a very bitter pill to swallow...I don't think I'll be able to easily choke that one down.