'It's been too late for a long time'

Sometimes it’s hard not to be a little jealous of our parents’ generation when they complain of watching their favorite rock stars age ungracefully. We may have never seen firsthand what Robert Plant looked like before his jowls gave in to gravity or recall a time when Keith Richards didn’t look like an animated corpse, but we at least understand that watching time take its toll on our musical heroes is better than losing them at an early age. Clearly, not all rock legends from decades passed survived to sing their children lullabies about groupies, psychedelica and rock in its heyday, before it fathered pop music’s bland and aesthetically unholy offspring. Baby boomers felt the pain of losing Hendrix, Bonham, Moon, Morrison and a handful of their musical peers too soon. The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle claimed its share of victims for the Reaper, but it was also the understood penalty of living too hard and rocking too loud. Nowadays, our musical heroes are still claimed by drugs. And we idolize lonely singer/songwriters whose lives end in accidental deaths or tragic suicides that peter out into murder suspicions. Since the music industry exhausted the vast majority of its finite energy supply in the glory days of rock ’n’ roll, musicians and their songs are a little more unassuming than they used to be. The image of the rock star is a hackneyed one that’s best saved for Halloween costume ideas; it’s hard to take a musician seriously when his grimy hair hasn’t been washed for days and his open shirt leaves nothing to the imagination, though we wish it had extended the courtesy.