Word: ages
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What will save them is that in a positive way, in a way that rock was never expected to tolerate, they are acting their age. The fan keeps coming back to Slipping Away and thinks about the deaths in the band family. There was, famously, the passing of Brian Jones, one of the formative members and chief sybarites, overdosed in 1969, found dead floating in his swimming pool. And more recently and just as crucially, there was Ian Stewart, the keyboard player, who died of a heart attack...
Easy to imagine Stewart smiling over Slipping Away. Easy, too, to hear such a stalwart pro lose patience with all this fretting about age and nostalgia. That may be the better way. Play the music, keep it up front and don't sweat the future. "Talent will survive," says Aretha Franklin, who mounted a successful tour herself this summer. "People with true talents and gifts will stand the test of longevity, with good business management." Right. Leave the fretting to everyone else. There is, indeed, a good measure of concern to go around...
Neil Young, who has a new album coming out in October, isn't bothered about restrictions of form, or of age. "Rock 'n' roll is about life, and age is a state of mind," he says. "The music's still wide open. All you need is the nerve, the nerve to do what you want to do." It takes more than nerve, though, to get played on the radio. Ken Barnes, editor of the industry trade magazine Radio & Records, figures that at least 40% of what is available to the whole American radio audience is "classic" or "oldies" rock. Demographics...
...bunch of rubbish." Greil Marcus, who writes formidably on popular and radical culture (the recent Lipstick Traces), talks about the "suicidal nostalgia" surrounding a lot of contemporary music: "People have been sold a bill of goods about the '60s, as if it were some kind of social Golden Age, when there was no Viet Nam, no social conflict. There weren't any Negroes, nothing bad happened. You have Woodstock, but you don't have the war. You have Jim Morrison as some image of sexual nirvana, but you don't have Janis Joplin for the miserable junkie...
...despite everything, it still can't be tightly classified or tied down. It's still a cultural orphan, hiding out on the far end of respectability: it has age, but it has no home. Or, as the greatest rock writer of all put it, splitting the distinction like an atom, no direction home. Like a complete unknown. Like a rolling stone...