Didn’t die before he got old

The Sixties were a long time ago. Pete Townsend is still alive, although no longer rocking. So why do the rockers who were adults then think they should keep on shaking their moneymakers up on stage. Oh, money, yeah, forgot about that. As John Strausbaugh writes in his new book Rock Til You Drop and in this extract on the Guardian, Mick and Keith are surely entitled to keep making music but we’re entitled to recognize that they a “once-great rock band that kept playing years and years after they’d gotten too old, had gone from the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world to the greatest self-parody of a rock’n’roll band.” Of course Strausbaugh pushes my button by citing Springsteen as a millionaire too old to do anything but push memories like a drug on fans.

Still, he has a point. I think there’s great fun to be had listening to music–new and old–from Springsteen, the Stones, and others but I agree that these aren’t the musicians pushing today’s youth culture; certainly not the way they did 25 and 35 years ago. Heck I can’t even listen to most of today’s new music. But I can always throw a Zep in the player!