The giants of rock are leaving the stage: their music never will
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Version 0 of 1. Three days before Christmas, TV news channels announced the death of Joe Cocker, the singer who had begun his adult life as a Sheffield gas fitter, and eventually settled in Crawford, Colorado. His passing, at 70, made it into the bulletins’ opening headlines, partly because his story was replete with signifiers of success and commercial achievement – a Grammy, the OBE – and an indelible association with one song: his cover of the Beatles’ With a Little Help from My Friends, which he had performed at the cultural watershed that was Woodstock. Earlier this month, the death of another English musician attracted slightly less attention, but in generational terms it was of a piece. Ian “Mac” McLagan was the keyboard player with the Small Faces and their successor group the Faces, and a supporting musician for such artists as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Billy Bragg. In 1991 he played on a Joe Cocker album entitled Night Calls, and among other common aspects of their life stories, they shared the sense of having come a very long way – in McLagan’s case, from his native Hounslow to Austin, Texas. His death – at 69, from a stroke – sent me back to records I have always treasured: the Small Faces’ brief but spectacular run of work between 1965 and 1969, and the often overlooked music made by the Faces, split between the devil-may-care raunch so well-suited to the young Rod Stewart, and songs that were sometimes achingly sad (among many such contenders, my favourite is Glad And Sorry). Moreover, I had interviewed McLagan a few times. All this was part of what caused a real pang of sadness – and a feeling I also experienced when news broke of Cocker’s death from lung cancer: an awareness of the final fading of an era which seems both impossibly long ago, but also somehow still with us, as even people who were not actually around at the time refuse to let it go. I was born at the end of 1969. My generation has always displayed the symptoms of what Douglas Coupland called legislated nostalgia, the condition of having memories we do not actually possess, not least when it comes to the worship of musicians a quarter-century older (and more). In our defence, I would cite something that seems pretty much unanswerable: the fact that they made music that has never been surpassed, in the midst of life-stories that have long seemed amazingly romantic. Combined, those two things surely denote what makes some people legendary. We are talking here about that singular generation mostly born during the second world war (McLagan arrived four days after VE day, Cocker a fortnight before the Normandy landings). All of them grew up with the monochrome conformity of the 40s and 50s, before the advent of rock’n’roll opened up amazing new possibilities. At the same time, many would-be musicians were changed for ever by time spent at art school, and the epiphanies sparked by a state-funded taste of bohemia. It is all there in McLagan’s 2000 memoir All the Rage: a time when “blistering nights at the Station hotel [in Richmond] or Eel Pie Island begat sluggish Monday mornings on the bouncy 73 bus route through Whitton”, and “days became nights and nights turned into days and nothing was the same again”. Inevitably, the members of this generation who made it through their initial success are now starting to leave us, just as we cling on to them more stubbornly than ever. The Stones (whose average age is over 70, and who this year lost their former sax player Bobby Keys) have just released a message suggesting that their mojos will go on working into 2015. Ray and Dave Davies, the eternally warring brothers behind the Kinks, have seemingly patched things up enough to try writing new songs together. The two surviving members of the Who will next year set out on a farewell tour, though they said the same back in 1982. Meanwhile, Jimmy Page – born in 1944, and the lead guitarist on Cocker’s celebrated Beatles cover – is still clearly miffed that his former colleague Robert Plant will not join a Led Zeppelin reunion, so he busies himself with joyously received reissues of their albums. Small wonder, perhaps, that the author and presenter Stuart Maconie recently suggested that “rock in the classic sense might be destined, like music hall or the madrigal, to be not with us for ever, but the defining art of particular places and a time: the US and the UK for a decade beginning in about 1966”. Maybe, he mused, our notion of the idealised rock star is as tied to a specific era as the Spanish conquistador or Victorian explorer: something encapsulated by Cocker, resplendent in his Woodstock tie-dye and luxuriant sideburns; or the Faces dressed in their King’s Road finery, clutching their port and brandies. Be in no doubt: as they go, these people take an entire culture with them, and by around 2030 our understanding of rock’s essence will be synonymous with recorded music, old footage, and the overwhelming sense of art that no subsequent generation could top. The Small Faces’ 1967 single Tin Soldier is as good an example as any: a song that sustains its sense of complete perfection from McLagan’s open electric piano chords, to a closing passage in which the music blaringly crescendos, and the only thing left for the drums to do is to rattle out a climactic tattoo. With three of its four makers now no longer here, what it represents is clearer than ever: the sound of history and raw talent combining to create something that would not – no, could not – be repeated, ever again. |