They are, Stewart and Wood, icons of the day: middle-aged rock stars with the hair of men half their age, playing songs for a public that, like Stewart’s young bride, model Rachel Hunter, was barely born when the songs first came out. And they are enormously, enormously successful, selling these old songs to audiences young and old. “Unplugged…and Seated,” the Stewart recording from the program, has for the last month been the second best-selling album in the country. And Stewart is not alone among the forty-somethings, and even fifty-somethings, at the top. The heroes of the baby boomers’ youth-the ones that rap, grunge and the simple passage of time were supposed to make obsolete-are back, in some cases as strong as ever. Never mind “Jurassic Park”: the true amazing dinosaurs are coming to a hockey arena near you.
Twenty-eight years after the Who sang, “Hope I die before I get old,” the Billboard charts are littered with rock stars older than the president. Tina Turner, 53 and a grandmother, is the subject of one of the sleeper hit movies of the summer, “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” Eric Clapton, 48, just swept the Grammy Awards for his own “Unplugged” performance, which has sold more than 6 million albums. Neil Young, 47, recently released the best-selling album of his career. Paul McCartney, 51, just finished a hugely successful concert tour, grossing more than $1 million a night, easy; the Grateful Dead, led by Jerry Garcia, 50, is out on yet another one, reaching a transgenerational audience that didn’t exist in the glory days of Haight-Ashbury. Aaron Neville, 52, Willie Nelson, 60, Paul Simon, 51, and even Mick Jagger-49 and a grandfather–are all now doing the richest solo work of their careers.
And if the fans have lost a step, they aren’t showing it. Elton John, 46 and tonsorially a bit ratty, can’t run fast enough to escape the clutching crowds of Tel Aviv; Tom Jones, 53, is still dodging projectile lingerie. And Pete Townshend, 48, is basking in the runaway success of the Broadway version of “Tommy,” a rock musical he wrote for the Who one year before Rachel Hunter was born. This resurgence is, at the very least, a shock to the system. As Paul McCartney told NEWSWEEK, “Of course, when I started out in the business I never imagined that I would still be doing it now…But the thing about rock and roll is that the normal rules of show business don’t apply. Rock and roll breaks the rules.”
For decades now, we have fretted over how our rock paragons would age. “I’d rather be dead than sing’ Satisfaction’ when I’m 45,” Mick Jagger announced back in 1975, speaking for a generation of musicians then on the brink. All along, they’d built their temple on the rock of youth, and the rest of us had hung on to it for support. If they got old-I mean, really old-what hope was there for the baby boomers who doted on them? With each new crease scored into Jagger’s face, each inch of real estate surrendered by James Taylor’s hairline, the question grew more urgent: did life really boil down to a choice between old men prancing around in spandex pants and (gulp) Michael Bolton?
Or worse: Would the men and women who prided themselves on their hip fluency in pop culture actually have to listen to the contemporary music of the day? To Naughty By Nature? To Pearl Jam? Many boomers jumped to country, but for others the choice was too much to bear. As Turner says, “I’m not putting it down, it’s great for kids…[but] we can’t call it music.”
For the musicians of past generations, the lucky ones, there was always Las Vegas waiting when they reached a certain age. “White folks play Vegas, don’t they?” Jackie Jackson of the Jackson 5 once quipped. “It’s the thing you do when you don’t have no hits, when you don’t have no choice.” But by their sheer numbers, the baby boomers have always demanded more than gaudy nostalgia. They’d defined their music as art–an appellation lavished freely on the drunken ramblings of Jim Morrison of the Doors, if not on the unpretentious epiphanies of Chuck Berry. And as art, they’ve expected it to last-and to keep coming. “There is no reason that one should cease to be creative when you hit the 40s,” says Danny Goldberg, 42, a vice president at Atlantic Records. “Rock and roll was originally perceived as a novelty art form which wouldn’t produce any meaningful artists. But rock and roll has produced some real geniuses-like Eric Clapton, who is still relevant after 25 years. The ones who can sustain their success are those who are able to adjust to adult themes. Those trying to relive their adolescence,” he adds, charitably, “are less successful.”
“Less successful” isn’t the half of it. At their worst, there has been something unseemly about the aging musicians’ refusal to grow old gracefully. There is the spectacle of Elton John’s hair weave, or McCartney’s catastrophic bid to go highbrow with his eight-movement “Liverpool Oratorio.” And then there are the Rolling Stones, whose attempts to keep up with musicians young enough to be their children have seemed more desperate with each passing decade. On their “Steel Wheels” tour just four years ago, a lavish affair that saw them mechanically worshiped by a giant inflatable woman, the band took the stage with the grim determination to prove that they weren’t old-that they could still act just like they did 20 years ago. Prove it they did. But it was without joy. If this was staying young, who needed it?
At their best, though, many of the old guys have returned to form simply by accepting their past, and not trying to compete with it. McCartney has broken down and beg-an performing Beatles songs in concert. At last October’s massive New York tribute concert to Bob Dylan, 52, the stage swelled with musicians who seemed comfortable with their age, dignified in the performance of the most impressive body of work their generation had produced. As George Harrison, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson and others sang, it was an evening of piercing honesty, bigger than nostalgia. It was a way to carry on-to keep on what McCartney calls “going out and doing it like the bluesmen have.”
Improbably, the biggest shot in the arm for the old rockers has come from MTV. In April 1991, Paul McCartney appeared on a new program called “Unplugged”–just him and a couple of guys, playing old material on acoustic instruments before a small crowd. The performance was offhand but pristine, a great batch of songs brought to life by a man who still sang them better than anybody else ever would. And it was quiet enough for listeners who’d had their fill of noise 20 years ago. For McCartney, who hadn’t released a decent album (outside the Soviet Union record) in more than a decade, the gig brought instant credibility. For both singer and network, the show sparkled with something neither had in much supply: taste.
It was a smash. McCartney’s “Unplugged” album, released in a limited edition of 500,000 copies, sold out almost immediately. In short order, Clapton, Stewart and Young all followed him onto the show, and all released albums of their performances. Says Stewart, calling from the deck of a 120-foot chartered yacht, somewhere between Sardinia and Corsica, “People seem to love these raw albums. It sorts the men out from the boys.”
If time has been forgiving, though, it has been less than fair. The years have been tougher on women and blacks than on white males. Acts like Smokey Robinson or the Four Tops-or even James Brown, whose influence drenches modern music-have not approached the second careers of Clapton or the Rolling Stones. Though Bonnie Raitt has made a comeback in her 40s, and Aretha Franklin, 51, is still going strong, women musicians of the boomer generation have had to contend with both the sexual biases of the ’60s and those of today. The Dylan concert, for example, featured none of his female peers. As an African-American woman, Turner faces a double bind, and her career bears the scars of her dislocations. Over her career, she’s been an R&B siren, an MTV queen, she’s been to Altamont, to Vegas and off the map-without much continuity in between, other than her own tenacious energy. Even the hit movie and her current successful summer tour don’t guarantee any further recording success. “I haven’t had a chance to do an album to match my stage performances,” she says. “That’s why I have to draw from really old ones of mine or songs from the Stones, because they write-they, the white guys-write rock-and roll songs, which is what I like. But unfortunately it’s not commercial, it’s not what’s happening now.” She remains, even in triumph, without a safety net, a slip away from the nostalgia circuit.
For many of the performers who have made it back, one secret is a simple combination of chemistry and mathematics. Sure, they’re older now, but they’re not weighed down by a load of drugs. “We tuned out early, when we were 14 or 15,” says Steven Tyler, 45, of Aerosmith, a band whose drug problems were so deep its principals once agreed to perform together only if they promised to take Antabuse, a substance that maker, its takers violently ill if they ingest alcohol. “And we tuned back in when we were 35. So if you’re truly where you were when we left off, we’re somewhere between 24 and 26. That helps a lot.” This is fuzzy arithmetic, perhaps, but don’t underestimate the band’s ability with numbers. Two years ago Aerosmith signed a reported $30 million recording deal that, at the band’s current rate, would last until Tyler turned 60. Or, by his calculation, 40.
Ah, the life of an aging rock star. It is not the orgy of excess it once was. Gone are the days when these musicians carried entourages of groupies and drug dealers from town to town. Instead, they take personal trainers, nutritionists, children, grandchildren and BenGay." There ain’t a lot you can do on the road," says Ozzy Osbourne, 44, who at a younger age once bit the head off a live dove at a meeting with his record company. Before his last tour, Ozzy ran three miles a day and eschewed all foods containing oil or fat. “Sex, drugs, rock and roll aren’t allowed anymore. I only have the rock and roll, and if I can’t pull that off I’m pissed off.”
And so they have turned out, these mighty generational warriors, exactly like men of a certain age everywhere, only richer and married to more famous models: well-meaning, sensible, a little dull. Here’s New York Times reporter Maureen Dowd recently describing the guys in the White House press corps: “Now the road is filled with a bunch of thirty-something, touchy-feely guys, tying up all the cellular-phone circuits trying to call home to talk baby talk to their wives and kids It’s enough to make a gal reach for the comfort of a Jack Daniel’s and a pack of Viceroys.” And here’s Billy Joel, 44, on life on the road with his band: “We read books, talk about our children, aches and pains…[At] rock-and roll parties, everyone is into golf and AA at my age.”
It is a tired, tired story, but one more common these days than not. Rod Stewart, who admits to an occasional glass of wine, calls himself “the last of a dying breed.” The life of today’s rock star often pales beside that of his accountant. Iggy Pop, for example, built a reputation in the late ’60s for smearing peanut butter over his body and diving into the audience. He describes a tour date from Copenhagen in the early ’70s: “[First, 1] take house paint and spray-paint my entire body so that I’m like a mythical creature. I looked great. There were a couple interesting–looking chicks in the [hotel] lobby, so I ran around with them to this cheap part of town where they sell gaudy cheap watches and spent all my money on these weird watches. And then the chicks I met that night-I met some new ones after the show, and they stole the watches anyway. So I ended up with no chicks and no watches. I think I threatened to jump out a window and made the front page of the [local paper]. I think it was because my room service was late.”
Now he says if he were going to Copenhagen to start a tour, “I’d go a day early to get over the jet lag. I’d probably sleep all day, go somewhere nearby for a quiet dinner with my wife, go back to the hotel, probably read-generally, history-and if I watched any TV it would be CNN. Then I’d crash, because I’d have a show the next day and I want to do a good job. [To] get ready for the show, I might take a little ginseng.” He reflects. “Boy, is this boring.”
But if the rock life has lost its lurid pizzazz, it has adapted itself to more homey pleasures. Joel says his wife, model Christie Brinkley, occasionally joins him on the road-for shows in Paris or Rome, at least. “Christie is smart,” he admits. And McCartney says he takes his kids everywhere. “I kind of dreaded my kids growing up,” he admits. “I thought they would reject my stuff and say, ‘We like rap, your music’s crap. ‘But I’m happy to say they’ve turned out to have groovy taste. My son, who is 15, for instance, is into Hendrix and a lot of ’60s stuff, which cheers me no end.”
And of course, there are the quiet rewards of good music played well. Clapton in middle age has written the most moving music of his career-including the Grammy-winning “Tears in Heaven” about the tragic death of his 4-year-old son, Conor. Aaron Neville at 52 has emerged as the distinguished voice of his generation. Rod Stewart is less ridiculous now than when he was Rachel Hunter’s age. Paul Simon has continued to renew himself by following his musical curiosity into lands that weren’t open to him in his youth, He has paradoxically traded the world-weariness of his youthful music for an adult, naive sense of wonder. After all this time, these guys have shown that growing up is possible after all. As Ray Davies, 49, leader of the Kinks, puts it, that was in the plan all along. “Apart from our very first hits, our music was never intended to be played only by kids on transistors. Parents have always come to our gigs. In the beginning it was to make sure their kids got home. Now they’re bringing their own kids to witness something they enjoyed when they were young.
Art Garfunkel, 51, is one of the veterans who never quite made it back to form. Married, raising a child and, he says, “much happier, more centered” than in the ’60s, he is currently in the middle of a concert tour and the recording of his eighth solo album. In October, he’ll rejoin Paul Simon on stage for an ambitious retrospective of the songwriter’s career. For Garfunkel, it’ll be a bright moment back in the spotlight, probably, but nothing more. We’re no more likely to hear his ninth solo album than his eighth. But still, he says, he’ll keep on. “Twenty years from now people will really have appreciated my music. I’ll be making another album and planning my next tour. Thirty years from now, when I’m in my 80s, I hope to be appreciating Europe with my family.”
Iggy Pop says that if he didn’t need the money, maybe he’d give it up. “I really like gardening,” he muses. “I wonder if I’d be happy to do just that.” But for now, this is just idle musing, the plans of a man who has not yet won the lottery. For now, he’ll keep on, as will the rest. They survived the adolescent turbulence that claimed some of their peers two decades back; maybe they can survive middle-aged sobriety now. There are worse ways to make a living. “You can have a lot of fun these days,” says McCartney. “In Perth, for instance, I spent the days sailing in a little single-handed boat, and I found myself out there surrounded by wild dolphins. The next day I went swimming with them. What more do you want-swimming with dolphins during the day and playing rock and roll to 40,000 people at night?”
After all, what are these guys supposed to do, give it up and get a real job? Smile, please, when you suggest that to Tina Turner.
Some current stars were once down so low it looked like up to them.
The midway point in Aerosmith’s years of excess. Singer Steven Tyler ends up buying drugs on Eighth Avenue, in New York City.
The man who wrote “You Can’t Catch Me” is charged with possession of marijuana and the making of pornographic videos (the latter charge was dropped).
One third of Crosby, Stills and Nash flees the FBI, then surrenders in Florida on drug and weapon charges.
Paul Simon performs in Central Park. Alone. “I’m not good enough to be invited,” moans Garfunkel.
The singer owes the Internal Revenue Service $16.7 million. His worldly possessions are seized and auctioned off.
Warner Brothers drops the singer after 12 years.
These musical off spring make it clear the kids are all right, too.
Features Chastity Bono, daughter of Sonny & Cher
The daughter of Nat (King)
Jim Croce’s son
Group features Don Everly’s son, Edan, and Frankie Avalon’s son, Frank
John’s son
A duet of Rick’s twins, Gunnar and Matthew
The lead singer is Bob Dylan’s son Jakob
Women’s group: Carnie and Wendy Wilson, daughters of Brian, and Chynna Phillips, daughter of Michelle and John
Frank’s son
