Fine Wine
Smelly Cheese
Recent plans and offlist discussions with fellow Townspeople have once again brought the issue of “aging well” to my mind. Being the Schau-obsessed person that I am, when I decided to dabble my 43-year-old toes in the world of live performance again, I officially hung up my rockin’ shoes and joined a ska band instead, being quite certain that the sight of me rockin’ out on stage would likely be a Very Embarassing Thing indeed.
Fine Wine
Smelly Cheese
Other Townsmen have told me that while they have no self-consciousness about doing the rock and roll thing at age (cough), they get irked when their musical efforts are automatically lumped into the category of the weekend rock and roll party warrior/Georgia Satellites and George Thorogood cover band member — as in, “oh, you play in a band? So does my husband — him and his friends played at our beach house a couple of summers ago; it was *great*!”
Fine Wine
Smelly Cheese
But some folks manage to pull the aging thing off with great aplomb, avoiding the need to slather on the Rock Of Olay, or chickening out to join a ska band, fer chrissakes. My question to our current musician townspeople is, how do you stay looking so young? What’s your secret? To those who have no stake in that game: what do *you* think makes certain rockers age like a bottle of fine wine, while others merely putrefy?
I look forward to your responses.
HVB
FINE WINE!
http://www.lemmymovie.com/
There are no spring chickens in my band, the Donuts. I’m 44 and there are two members who younger and two older than me. When we first got together, I insisted that we wear matching suits because I didn’t trust what a bunch of 40 year old guys were going to wear on stage. (I was actually unrealistically hoping to find early 60s style shark skin suits). The suits have provided us with a visual cohesiveness and removed the potential for someone in the band to, say, show up wearing a pair of Birkenstocks. The suits also had the unintended effect of getting us tagged as a garage band, which isn’t a particularly accurate description of our sound, notwithstanding the fact that we recorded our first 2 albums in a garage.
As for the “rocking out” part, it’s admittedly a bit unseemly at our age but the proper mix of tequila and caffeine makes me significantly less self conscious about it.
Thanks for those anti-aging tips, cdm. Uniforms can, indeed, be a key component in the formula. You are my Rock Ponce de Leon!
Mmmm, the dress code issue is one I and one or two other bandmates buy into but not all. We get STRONG resistance from The Velvet Fog, in particular. The man says he needs his comfort. He’s asked to perform in a terrycloth robe, which we will NOT allow! When it gets down to it, though, there’s no getting around age in rock ‘n roll. The most important factors for being able to continue to get the music across is a) to have something relevant to play, b) to play even your old songs in a meaningful way, and c) to allow yourself to be in the moment. There are a hundred things you can do wrong, but I truly believe that an artist able to play “in the moment” transcends age.
hrrundi, ‘fess up, did you start this entire thread just so at some point in the comments you could insert the phrase “Rock Ponce de Leon”?
As God is my witness, I will use that phrase sometime this weekend!!
Al, be sure to remember “de Leon”.
Hey, Mod — where do the members of AC/DC miss the boat on your points a.), b.) and c.) above?
Oh, and Velv should *definitely* be allowed to perform, Brian Wilson-like, in his terry cloth robe!
The key is not to fake it. No Grecian Formula and no Just For Men. You don’t even have to play the elder statesman like Nick Lowe does. The new B-52’s record is all about sex, and it rocks! (I admit I haven’t seen them lately, and I suspect hair coloring is involved in their current Look.) Pretending to be young is always the problem.
Jon Langford is another good example of a fine wine. Randy Newman just posted a current promo photo on the front page at randynewman.com that says basically “I’m old. Deal with it.”
Who’s the last smelly cheese? I don’t recognize him.
Good advice, mockcarr, good advice!
Fritz, as a member of a ska band you are in an excellent position to go the suit route. It does not matter in the least what they look like, by the way.
Mr Mod, You’ve been at the helm of a great band for quite some time now, so I hesitate to question your judgment, but I’m concerned that you have lost your perspective on this. Why on earth would you object to the Velvet Foghorn in a terry cloth robe? That is the exact kind of behavior you should be encouraging. He should be up there in a terry cloth robe, slippers and waving a coffee mug around while belting out the songs. What a visual! This gimmick could be the next in a long line of visual shenanigans which have helped raise the profile of the band (from the beards and matching guitars of Fritz’s beloved ZZ Top, to the dandyish duds of Fritz’s beloved Upper Crust).
I’ve been trying to get our singer to wear a wedding gown and have the rest of us in bridesmaids dresses for some time now. No luck so far but I’m not giving up. Music for the sake of music is a noble endeavor but without the Mach Shau, there is the risk of ending up with something like the Grateful Dead (and even they had Bobby mincing about on stage).
I beg you to reconsider.
That’d be Angus Young.
Mod, cdm is RIGHT! Reconsider!
One of the last times I played on stage with Hrrundi he had us all in Dickies coveralls. I guess that went okay until some old broad wanted me to clean the Ladies’ room.
Seriously, why is Tequila so popular?
Speaking of the fine wine/smelly cheese issue, I’m off to see Van Halen this weekend with Townsman Massimo. Eddie’s back (again) from rehab — I’ll post reports.
HVB
Ah, Minivan Halen
Coveralls, excellent.
Mockcarr asked “Seriously, why is Tequila so popular?”
Well, right now it’s going through the same kind of trendy cycle that vodka and gin went through not so long ago.
Personally, if it’s good tequila, I find it can actually be a somewhat tasty drink (although I’m much more partial to Irish whiskey). But more importantly, it gives me a kind of get-up-and-go buzz like no other liquor, which I find helpful when there is some serious Rockin’ to be done.
Hrrundi, my main problem with the music of AC/DC, even when the band had its impressive muscle mass, is the complete lack of relevance of almost any lyric any of their two lead singers ever uttered. I think they’ve always been fine on parts b) and c) of my criteria. I’m not sure that they’ve lost much over the years. Whenever I’ve seen them on tv shows over the past 10 years, their music seems as good as ever. Their lyrics are juvenile by 5th-grade standards. I don’t know that they can be smelly cheese because they’ve been Velveeta from the start. What do you think? You love those guys.
Bring wine onstage, and rather than playing your tunes, let them play you. Enjoy yourself.
I’ll second saturn: look like you’re enjoying yourself on stage. Don’t worry about being theatrical. And don’t be self-conscious..
HVB, have you answered my question yet, are you saying, by the posting of that Angus Young photo, that AC/DC has not aged well? Please explain.
Hrrundi…still waiting. What’s the word on modern-day AC/DC? Could they have aged like one of those highly regarded smelly cheeses?
I can’t answer for him, but as someone in the pro-AC/DC camp, I’ll say no, there was really no way for them to age gracefully. The entire thrust of the band is reveling in a kind of salacious immaturity, and there’s no classy way to do that when you reach true Old Guy status, though in their favor, they always did kinda look like skeezy old guys. One thing they could have done – and I think this came up when we discussed the Jailbreak and Let There Be Rock videos previously – is stopped Angus from going full-time with the schoolboy outfit and had him change it up every now and then, so his (and the band’s) image wouldn’t have gotten so thoroughly tied to that part of their Look.
I say Aerosmith has aged worse, though, on the Look front. AC/DC has just gotten older, uglier and balder. Aerosmith has gotten older and (somehow) uglier, but they’ve held on to general approximations of their hair and now they look like Sid & Marty Kroft DC Follies puppet versions of themselves.
Mod, sorry — been busy, and out of town checkin’ out the Halen with Townsman Massimo.
Briefly, though: AC/DC — until and unless they prove me wrong with this rumored new album of theirs — are firmly, stinkily, in the Smelly Cheese category. That whole adolescent single-entendre thing hasn’t aged well (compare with ZZ Top’s ageless single-entendre-isms) — and the schoolboy outfit is in the awkward stage where Angus looks like a bloody idiot *today*, and will likely not have the balls to just fucking keep at it until its weirdness eclipses its age issues. (Angus at *70* in a schoolboy outfit would kick ASS.)
So, no, you’ll get no AC/DC apologium from me this evening. They either need to astonish and appall us by keeping at it for 20 more years, or hang it up. Personally, I’m hoping this new album of theirs is a true lo-fi, eight-tracks-and-no-more return to form, a la “Let There Be Rock” — or perhaps a long-overdue straight blues/boogie album. They say that’s what Angus plays exclusively when he’s not doing the band thing. How cool would it be to hear them let what’s left of their hair down and just *boogie* for an album? A real jeans-and-a-T-shirt kind of affair; you know what I mean.
Later —
HVB
Good stuff, Alexmagic. Thanks for doing the work HVB has refused to complete.
You know I kid, HVB. I am aware that you have a life and occasionally have more important things going on. We’re talking a near contender for the Holy Trinity of Rock here. It’s not like you’ve been ducking out on hippie or Dylan issues. 🙂