“Maybe rock and roll never dies but it sure gets old…” Jon Foreman
Concertgoers my age have had to acknowledge some uncomfortable perspective shifts. The young people you remember come out on stage and they’re freaking old people. Then I think: “Oh yeah, me too.”
But it seems rock and roll does age well. We saw X last night and this is a band comfortable with its age. The fact that they’ve had all the decades to become an even more awesome band is the important part. These are first-rate musicians and this is a great band!
Billy Zoom wearing my grandfather’s glasses, pleasant grin all night, hardly moving he’s so cool. His fingers fly but he’s not breaking a sweat. Occasionally he licks his pick, sticks it to the middle of his forehead and steps up to the sax to play a bit, grinning for pictures between riffs.
More experiment and jazz than I expect. The country-rockabilly influences. The vibraphone just lovely. All wrapped up in solid rock.
To my aging concert mates I say: let’s all age well and make the most of all the music.
Punk rock, like sushi, does not age well…
but God bless them if they can get up there and play a show that enthuses fans.
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I thought of them as punk too. But what I saw was a band with a rich foundation which includes jazz, country, rockabilly, etc. they re top-notch musicians who’ve been immersed in a lot for many years. Very comfortable with themselves even in their advanced (lol) ages!
It’s interesting to have the perspective of time and maturity when looking at that punk era. Some of the stuff that seemed awesome then doesn’t hold up, and some of those musicians who seemed to be all about the pose turn out to have been real musicians with artistic integrity–the former were cotton candy but the latter are still around and it’s really all about the art and music. God bless them!
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