Yleisö ei vanhetessaan enää siirry pehmeämpään Mantovaaniin tai tradijazziin, vaan pitää nuoruutensa suosikit. Varmasti esimerkiksi Elton Johnilla ja Tom Jonesilla riittää Pori Jazzissa kuulijoita ja sitäpaitsi Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Neil Young, Paul McCartney ja kumppanit ovat edelleen oivassa luomisvireessä, joten vanhemmille ikäluokille riittää uuttakin kuultavaa.
Once upon a time, rock music was young - and its stars were, too. Bob Dylan will be 70 years old next Tuesday, May 24. Seventy! From one perspective, looking through the prism of youth-obsessed pop culture, it seems such an extraordinary thing. Pop freezes its icons in moments in time, and Dylan will always be there at the explosive birth of the modern pop age, manning the barricades of the Sixties revolution, captured in black and white: a skinny, grave-faced, curly haired, visionary twentysomething, strumming his acoustic guitar, blowing bony notes through his harmonica, warning the adult establishment to get out of the way (“Senators, congressmen, please heed the call/ Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall”) because the times they were a-changin’.Well, the times have changed all right and Dylan with them. This year, he has toured the once mysterious and inaccessible land of China, allegedly submitting his set list to censorship by the powers that be. He didn’t play The Times They Are a-Changin’ but he did play his world-weary postscript from the year 2000, Things Have Changed, in which he growls with a defeatism that borders on defiance: “People are crazy, times are strange/ I used to care but things have changed.” Yet he ended his set in Beijing with his beautiful 1974 hymn Forever Young, in which he elegantly celebrates the most positive virtues of youth: “May your heart always be joyful/ May your song always be sung.”
We are still singing Dylan’s songs, in all their poetry, wisdom, contradiction and complexity. His sombre, gospel-tinged ballad Make You Feel My Love from 1997 has just spent more than 40 weeks in the British top 40, delivered with worshipful authority by 23-year-old star of the moment, Adele.
Shift the pop-culture prism, and Dylan at 70 starts to make a different kind of sense, because he has been here, right in front of us all this time, hair greying, jowels sagging, wrinkles spreading across his face, voice slowly turning from the barbed wire ululations of a youth in thrall to the ageless depths of folk to a rubbed raw bullfrog croak of an old man giving it whatever his ragged vocal cords still can.
And he is not alone, out there on the geriatric frontline. Paul McCartney (68) is on tour, and planning a new album. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (both 67) are considering another Rolling Stones tour. Brian Wilson (68) is currently on tour in Britain, no longer a Beach Boy, but still a celebrated musical genius. Paul Simon (69) has a new album and tour this year. Roger Daltrey (67) has been performing the Who’s rock opera, Tommy. Rock and roll once revelled in its youthful flash of energy, delighting in anti-adult sloganeering like “Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” and Pete Townshend’s aggressively nihilistic “I hope I die before I get old” (he is 66 today), but those who survived its first hedonistic impulses inevitably did get old, and along the way made some vital new discoveries. Music is for life. And life is long.
It.is a good time to be a veteran rock musician. Bob Dylan’s last album, 2009’s Together Through Life, was number one on both sides of the Atlantic, his first British chart topper since Desire in 1975. Neil Diamond (70) had his first ever number one studio album in Britain in 2008. Leon Russell (69) staged a critically acclaimed comeback last year with The Union, made with Elton John (a mere stripling of 64).
Other spring chickens enjoying a second wind of recording and touring success include Greg Allman (63) and Robert Plant (a youthful 62), who, when challenged about being a sexagenarian rock star in a radio interview, smartly retorted “old people do it better”. Perhaps that could be a new slogan for our times. But it would be a mistake to get too carried away by the apparent triumph of age over beauty. As recorded music sales collapse and musical activity migrates towards the internet, it is older consumers still romantically attached to the notion of the long-playing record as a cohesive work of art who are keeping the album alive. Bob Dylan fans, in other words.
The young are still with us, illegally downloading Lady Gaga, Rihanna and provocative art rapper Tyler The Creator. And if you haven’t heard of him, then all it shows is that the generation gap is still wide open. But veterans are cleaning up on the still thriving live circuit, too, trading on reputations built over time. According to a recent report on the live music industry by Deloitte, a full 40 per cent of the frontmen of the top 20 highest grossing live acts in the States will be 60 or over next year.
Rock got old, and so has its audience. This is our music, and it still speaks to us, still tells us things about our lives, still brings us joy in the moment, still carries our spirits aloft. Because it turns out that we didn’t, as we perhaps might have once imagined in more innocent times, all slip into pipes and slippers and start listening to Mantovani and trad jazz. Certainly, we may have shifted the dial from BBC Radio One to Radio 2, but only to find the DJs were getting older with us, and are still playing our songs. And even if veteran artists are only talking to their own generation, we should celebrate the very fact that they are still talking.
Paul Simon, an artist working at the very heights of lyrical singer-songwriting, has spoken of being on “a new frontier”: the frontier of age. Prior to the Sixties, popular songs were essentially show tunes, dance tunes, novelty songs and love songs. Dylan and his contemporaries introduced the notion of the songwriter as a poetic chronicler of his life and times, they were artists of their own interior worlds, making pop music music that aspired to the same heights as other art forms.
This remains the challenge, as Simon would have it: “The struggle of Dylan and the Stones and McCartney and Neil Young is to see the possibility of talent continuing to evolve, as is the case in other arts. Nobody says you should stop painting when you’re 60.”
Dylan at 70 makes sense to us, because he is still helping his listeners make sense of the world. The final track on his most recent album is a masterpiece every bit as beautifully wrought and challenging as The Times They Are a-Changin’, even if its message might sound sour in the mouth of a firebrand youth. It’s All Good simultaneously rails against and accepts the injustices of life, juggling with the great and small in an almost mocking spirit, eyes fixed on an even bigger picture. “Big politicians telling lies/ Restaurant kitchens, all full of flies” barely seem to move Dylan at 70, as he declares he “wouldn’t change a thing, even if I could”.
It’s a song no child could have written, magnificent in its ambiguity, the great bard of pop culture barking out his indifference over a rattling rock and roll rhythm, snapping “throw on the dirt, pile on the dust”. It is, as he wryly notes, “all good”.
As we mark Dylan’s shifts from the raging fires of youth to the slow-burning embers of old age, we should celebrate not just his extraordinary legacy, but the even more extraordinary fact of his continuing creativity, reporting back from what may turn out to be popular music’s last unexplored frontier.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/
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