TSDK No. 77. The Longest Goodbye

My two years of listening to records made by giants of popular music aged 77 and up

Two years ago, I was in a Barnes and Noble when I saw that Willie Nelson had released a new LP, A Beautiful Time. Having seen him perform live a few years earlier when he was already looking exceedingly wizened, I wondered just how old he was; a quick Google search revealed that he had just turned 90.

I was awestruck at Nelson’s indefatigability and sustained creativity. What does music by a 90-year-old sound like? I wondered. It turned out that A Beautiful Time sounded exactly like a Willie Nelson record, albeit with added grain in the voice and a heightened focus on mortality. In songs like “I Don’t Go to Funerals” Nelson made it clear that he knew he couldn’t go on forever, but he was going to die trying.

This led me to think of other megafauna of popular song who have been fixtures of our lives for so long. It used to be that a “dinosaur” was a rock star in his forties; now, we have grown accustomed to septuagenarian and even octogenarian legacy acts who are “on tour forever”. When playing live, they stick to the hits. But some, such as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, follow Willie’s lead and continue to release new music, even if it rarely makes the setlists.

What were these old folk singing about? They had lived extraordinary lives during a period of radical social and cultural change. Perhaps they had something to teach me. I decided to make a systematic study of their music and find out.

My original plan was to draw up a list of records made by anyone who had reached retirement age. These days, however, everyone from Madonna (67) to Phil Oakey from The Human League (70) qualifies for a bus pass so to keep things manageable I raised the qualifying age to 77. Partly this was in reference to the “27 club” of stars such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison who burned bright and died young, but also because 77 is a point at which the reality of aging becomes undeniable. To keep creating and performing in the face of accelerating frailty is itself an achievement, regardless of whether the music is any good.

Unfortunately, this eliminated the exceptional records Johnny Cash made with Rick Rubin at the end of his career, which set the standard for popular music made in the shadow of mortality. Cash was a mere 61 years old when he released the first of those LPs, and only 71 when he died, a decade later. I decided instead to start with the equally legendary Bob Dylan, who has released two albums since turning 77 in 2018: Rough and Rowdy Ways, a collection of new songs, and Shadow Kingdom, reinterpretations of classics.

Rough and Rowdy Ways had some good tracks; I especially enjoyed “Mother of Muses”, a humble invocation to the creative spirit from a man who had written hundreds of songs and was unsure how many were left in him. But it also contained “Murder Most Foul”, an interminable dirge about JFK that demonstrated for the umpteenth time that it is long past time to put the 1960s to bed once and for all. Shadow Kingdom was extremely dull, though maybe if I had known the originals better I would have appreciated the old man versions more (I am at best a casual Dylan listener). Both records demonstrated that Dylan had the advantage that, as a folk singer, he could draw upon traditional American musical styles like blues and jazz that had no intrinsic association with youth, so there was nothing jarring about the thought of him continuing into his 80s. Like Willie Nelson, he leaned into the aging in his voice to add poignancy to his performances.

Next I turned my attention to that other living monument from the 1960s, Paul McCartney. McCartney III, released when he was 78, was a pandemic project. Holed up in his studio, he had played every instrument on the record himself. At first I quite liked it. The tracks were for the most part upbeat and lively, although they sounded more like exercises in song construction than actual acts of self-expression. Things deteriorated about half through on a “joke” track about a gold digger called “Lavatory Lil” that was at least as bad as anything he had ever done, including the one with the frogs in it. Curiously, McCartney’s many years on this earth did not appear to have left him with much to say about anything; or if he did, he wasn’t putting any of it into a song. He had more insight into the human experience in his 20s when he wrote “Eleanor Rigby”. The lyrics left no impression, certainly there was nothing that came within a thousand miles of the image of Father McKenzie “writing a sermon that no-one will hear”, or the face left in a jar. On the other hand, I was impressed at how sonically forward looking McCartney’s record was in comparison to Dylan’s retro stylings, until I realized that it, too, was in its own way rooted in the past. The Beatles had pioneered the idea of the studio as instrument, while McCartney had twice before made records where he played every part: McCartney and McCartney II. But maybe there is no way around that when you’ve been recording music for more than sixty years?

The past lay heavy on Kris Kristofferson’s The Cedar Creek Sessions, a collection of stripped-down reinterpretations of songs from his back catalogue released five days before his 80^th birthday; and it was almost as overwhelming on Loretta Lynn’s Wouldn’t It Be Great? which mixed a handful of new songs with classics from her career, released when she was 86. Van Morrison, meanwhile, had succumbed to nostalgia entirely. At age 77 he put out an album of the skiffle music he had enjoyed as a teenager, then followed it up with an album of early rock n’ roll covers, Accentuate the Positive, a year later.

By contrast, Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms, released when he was 81, was a collection of new songs. Like Dylan’s late period work, it drew upon classic American styles, such as folk, blues and jazz, but it took these influences into strange territory. The record was a mystical rumination on God, love, forgiveness and death, inspired by a dream and the Biblical book of Psalms. Insofar as I was looking for messages from the end of life, it was exactly the sort of record I hoped existed, though it was so internal and personal I thought it might be a few decades before I could understand it, if I ever did.

The ranks of the 77 club were larger than I had anticipated. I discovered that Ron Carter, who played double bass in Miles Davis’ second quintet, was still going strong in his late 80s and had released several records of retro jazz, while John McLaughlin, who joined Davis’ group during his fusion period, was putting out new music that featured a high degree of guitar gymnastics, even as he was pushing 80. I discovered records made by the legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker in the 1990s, and a totally superfluous album Jerry Lee Lewis had released before he died, revisiting his early work with neither energy nor enthusiasm.

After a while, all the looking backwards got to be a bit suffocating. I also noticed that (John McLaughlin notwithstanding), the older you got, the slower you played: listening to the 77 club was a bit like getting stuck behind a particularly cautious pensioner in the slow lane. Besides that, the music suffered from a surfeit of nothing left to prove. These artists were not competing with their younger selves: they had written their hits, made their money, perhaps even helped define an era, and now they were making music because they felt like it. More power to them, but I missed the hunger of youth that gave their early records such potency.

Consequently, Dolly Parton’s Rock Star, was strangely refreshing. As a collection of classic rock songs featuring superannuated guest vocalists such as Rob Halford of Judas Priest and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, it too looked backwards. Yet it was not something she had ever done before, and as an overtly commercial product designed to give the young whippersnappers ruling the charts a run for their money, it was a genuinely ambitious project. And it worked: Rock Star entered the Billboard 200 at number three, making it Dolly’s highest charting album ever. By no means was it any good — you might even say it was terrible — but I appreciated Rock Star nonetheless because she was clearly having fun and there was still joy in her voice (even when she was singing about how much she hated herself). Also, she was still capable of doing fast songs; the bright and energetic production was refreshing after so much rootsy plodding along.

The Rolling Stones’ Hackney Diamonds was even more ambitious. Like Rock Star, it was an overtly commercial product; Mick and Keith had not released a record of original material in 18 years and didn’t need to, having settled into an extremely lucrative twilight touring their greatest hits. Returning to the fray, they obviously felt that they had something to prove. The record adhered closely to the template of their late 60s/early 70s peak to such an extent that it almost sounded like a pastiche of themselves — but its energy was undeniable, and I enjoyed it more than I expected. It wasn’t an essential record, but it wasn’t bad either, and it had better hooks than anything they had done since Some Girls in 1978. Like Dolly, they were rewarded for their ambition: Hackney Diamonds also debuted at number three in the Billboard 200, and topped the charts in the UK.

We place a high value on innovation in Western culture, and many members of the 77 club were once revered as trailblazers. As should be clear by now, however, for most of them that was all in the past. Paul McCartney’s ears at least were still open; he had handed off McCartney III to younger musicians to “reimagine” the record, but he was not the one weaving electronica into the tracks.

There were exceptions, however. John Cale, who was responsible for all the avant-garde aspects of the Velvet Underground, puts out records that sound nothing like the ones he made as a younger man, featuring sounds and styles such as hip hop beats, loops and electronica that he first started experimenting with in his 60s (there are no hip hop or techno legends in the 77 club; none of them are old enough, though Karl Hyde of Underworld is 68 so grandpa rave music is already a thing). Indeed, Mercy, released when he was 81, sounded a little too much as though it had been composed and performed in-computer to me; I found myself wishing he would scrape on his viola for a bit, or mess around with guitar feedback. Meanwhile, on The Source, the Nigerian-Ghanaian drummer Tony Allen who rose to prominence as Fela Kuti’s band leader in the 1970s, fused Parisian jazz with Afrobeat rhythms, taking an old sound and making it new again. Allen was a true musical adventurer: before he died in 2020 at the age of 79, he jammed with hip hop artists many decades his junior. I much preferred The Source, but admired his ambition. As he put it himself: “The line of music, there is no end. We just have to explore.”

But is the pursuit of the new actually the highest value by which to judge a work? I found I was at least as impressed by a group of prolific artists who more or less did what they always did. For them, making music was like breathing.

Willie Nelson belonged to this cohort, obviously. A Beautiful Time was actually his 17^th release since turning 77; he has made four more since, the most recent being Workin’ Man, a collection of songs by Merle Haggard, which was released just last week. Similarly, Dave Brock of Hawkwind, who has put out seven albums since turning 77 could be relied on to make psychedelic space rock, whether he was in his 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s. After turning 77 this year, Brian Eno released a pair of LPs in quick succession, with a third coming in October. Two feature a female vocalist, Beatie Wolfe, but all of them float along on the ambient music that has been his stylistic hallmark for decades (it would no doubt offend Eno to find himself categorized with artists who stick to a specific approach, but to quote a great philosopher “I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em”). Hans-Joachim Roedelius, a former Eno collaborator, also fell into this category. He was a child star in Nazi Germany, then conscripted into the Wehrmacht in the dying days of the war; at 90 years old, he maintains a steady stream of experimental electronica and tranquil piano music.

If we are to judge by consistency and dedication, however, then the greatest member of the 77 club is Leonard Cohen, whose output in his final years was, uniquely, on a par with his earlier work. After disappearing up a mountain to meditate for the best part of a decade, Cohen discovered that his retirement fund had been pilfered by his manager, and threw himself back into work. That final streak included three records that were released after he turned 77, and a fourth that followed posthumously. Of these, You Want it Darker, is a masterpiece: Cohen talks with God, reflects on yearning and loss and aging, looking backwards and forward with wry humor and wisdom. In fact, I would put You Want it Darker on my turntable before Songs of Leonard Cohen or Songs from a Room, the records on which he built his reputation. Unlike Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms, it is highly accessible. I already understand what Cohen is talking about, all that remains is for me to catch up with him and feel it.

And what of today’s stars? Will the likes of Taylor Swift or Beyonce keep making new music into their dotage? At first, I thought it unlikely, because pop music is inextricably bound up with youth. But then again, Petula Clark released an album of perfectly pleasant pop music at age 83 so perhaps I am wrong and we can expect 60 more years of Sabrina Carpenter. A greater obstacle is likely to be the changing nature of how people listen to music. “Kids these days” are less invested in artists and more focused on songs, which they discover via viral clips on social media or playlists without knowing or caring about the performer. It is difficult to imagine many careers enduring for decades on that basis. There are exceptions, of course. Taylor Swift, at least, could return to her country roots — perhaps an album of Dolly Parton covers awaits us fifty years in the future.

However, I doubt that even if today’s pop stars do keep creating into their 70s and 80s, that the output will be as varied, or as interesting, or as voluminous, or even as annoying as that of the artists who still bestride the world’s arenas like time-worn colossi. From Roger Waters’ dismal re-recording of Dark Side of the Moon to his ex-colleague David Gilmour’s innocuous Luck and Strange, from Ringo Starr’s genial country album Look Up, to Alice Cooper’s unexpected reunion with his original bandmates after half a century, from Rod Stewart’s swinging collaboration with Jools Holland to John Fogerty pointlessly re-recording his Credence hits, from Yes’ Jon Anderson making True, his best album in forty years, to 83 year old Smokey Robinson singing lasciviously about “Gasms” the 77 club can’t stop, won’t stop.

Their extraordinary energy creates the illusion that they will be around forever. The truth is, however, that era of megafauna is almost over. In five years, many of them will be gone, in ten years most of them will be gone. We will not see their likes again. That being the case, let us enjoy their long goodbye, including the music they make today. For those about to rock/swing/croon/strum/pluck/groove/twang/jam, we salute you.