by Ira Faro

Created on: October 25, 2009

ROCK AIN'T THE BLUES

The question answers itself, although McCartney and the Stones are slightly different cases.

Would we ask if BB King or Aretha Franklin are too old to sing the blues? Of course not. The blues is about love lost, hard times in a cruel world. Even if their lives today are no longer characterized by the struggles that they experienced in their youth, the memories of those times are still real to them and are expressed powerfully.

Rock and roll is different.

The very essence of rock and roll is youth, youth and rebellion, rebellion and defiance. Are we to believe that Mick Jagger still can't get no satisfaction, that he's still a monkey man? It seems to me that if he tries sometimes, he just might find that he gets BOTH what he needs AND what he wants?

McCartney is a bit different. He was never really a rocker except, perhaps, in the very earliest Cavern Club days. But, with a little help from his friends, he became one of popular music's greatest troubadours, a composer of ballads, a wooer of women. And who is sadder than the old gent who does not realize that he has become invisible to the freshest and youngest of the fair sex?

OK. So Paul is not exactly invisible. Neither is Jagger, for that matter. But it's just not the same.

I remember being crushed to learn that Grace Slick had made it clear that her days as a rock goddess were over. She would not, she said, embarrass herself by prancing across the stage at the age of 50 looking foolish. I came to understand precisely what Grace meant while watching a video of the Stones at a recent gig at Madison Square Garden. I had to turn it off. The sight of Mick Jagger, performing what can only be described as a parody of Mick Jagger, was just too much to bear.

Forty years ago, I told Cathey, my wife, that I couldn't wait until I turned fifty. There would, I predicted, be oldies shows touring the country featuring bands like Cream and Traffic, bands that I never had the good fortune to see in their prime. Why not? The great do-wop groups had been reduced to touring cut-rate venues at cut-rate prices. Why shouldn't the same fate befall my favorite rockers? Cathey thought that I was crazy, that all of the great rockers would all be either dead or retired. I was obviously wrong. So was she. Cream reunion tickets went for hundreds of dollars in the nosebleed sections.

Do I deny them the right to perform their music and make their money? Of course not. But let's not pretend that it's cutting edge rock and roll. It's an oldies show. Not cut rate, but an oldies show just the same.

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