Too old to rock?

[matthew rosedon]

I'm 53 and probably one of the oldest Hideout members.  This started me thinking.  Here in the UK you would have first heard Elvis in 1955.  If you were 16 then you'd be 72 now.  Does anyone know of senior citizens out there who are still rocking?  By rocking I don't mean listening to Oldie stations on a Sunday drive.  I mean actively listening to the Chocolate Watchband, Beefheart, Downliners Sect or whoever.  Or even seeking new and wild sounds.  Can you be too old to rock?

[Don]

That has been my experience as well but in my case the passing of years allowed me to to rediscover things that I'd been exposed to in my youth.  Beethoven, Brahms, Handle, Bach. Even Gilbert and Sullivan who, while never angry, pegged society with a thoroughly 'today' seeing eye and great humor at the expense of society at large.

This later point I realized as early as the late sixties and early seventies.  Having moved from pop to blues by way of acid rock I thought, as I looked at my acid-headed, flower-bedecked, friends, "aren't we something new!"  Then I chanced upon these lyrics...

If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line as a man of culture rare,

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant them ev'rywhere.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your complicated state of mind,

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter of a transcendental kind.

Those words were written by Arthur Sullivan in 1881 for use in the delightfully cynical operetta "Patience."

To old to rock indeed!

:)

-don

zacharythax said:

I think when you get older your world just expands. Mine doesn't EXCLUDE garage, I've just been able to appreciate more different things, and finding the same SPIRIT in other places. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" is coming from the same place as "Anarchy in the U.K." and the chilling sneering works of Shostakovich have that same no wave feel as The Honeymoon Killers. 

[Audio Gasoline]

Link Wray played in our town about 6 months before he died - he was 76.