At Coachella near Palm Springs, California, in October, a special festival over two weekends will feature the biggest rock stars in the world. Ok, they are among the oldest rock stars in the world, too. But they are still the biggest: Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan (playing on the same bill for the first time), The Rolling Stones, The Who, Neil Young, and Roger Waters, singer-songwriter with Pink Floyd.
The 1960s will live again for an audience not just from America but worldwide, with the various acts reportedly promised $7m each.
But this is far from a case of bringing iconic ’60s stars out of retirement. All of these acts, each one now into their 70s, are still touring, still playing stadiums.
Rock was once seen as an activity with a definite sell-by date. “In the Beatles we always said it wouldn’t last more than 10 years,” Paul McCartney told me when I met him. When I asked him if he still rubbed his eyes that he and other acts like the Stones and Dylan were still playing to full houses, he said: “I do. We all do. I didn’t foresee it. But it kept on and kept on and it kept being good and we seemed to be the people who could do it.”
“Now there is a great young generation of people who can also do it, but it tends to be that the people packing them in are the people who have the material, have hits and a I think that’s important, songs that people know. I think they have stagecraft, they have an ability with an audience,” he said.
So, though Pete Townshend of The Who famously wrote the lyric for his 1965 song My Generation, “Hope I die before I get old”, far from dying or even acknowledging getting old, the original rock pioneers are still playing all the way to the bank.
Except, that’s not actually quite the case. Notice anything about the Coachella line-up? It’s a case of spot-the-woman. While the guys rock on and on and on, female music stars do seem to find it harder to play to vast audiences in their 60s and 70s, or even play at all.
Joni Mitchell, the stunning singer-songwriter who was the heroine of a generation in the ’70s and ’80s, once said that when a female star reaches 50, record companies lose interest because “record companies want ‘the look’, and at 50, no matter how well preserved a woman is, she just doesn’t have ‘the look’.”
Sadly in recent years Mitchell’s health has deteriorated and she recently found herself in intensive care in hospital. The possibility of her ever taking to the stage again is remote.
Carole King, the legendary singer and songwriter who goes back even further than The Beatles, Stones and Dylan, did delight a crowd in London’s Hyde Park this summer with a rare gig. But her appearances are few and far between. Slightly younger middle-aged females such as Dolly Parton (70-years-old) do tour, but one has to search hard to find some of the vintage that make up the forthcoming all- male Coachella line-up.
As it happens I did go to see a woman of precisely that vintage perform a few weeks ago in London. Marianne Faithfull, who broke on to the scene in the ’60s with her recording of the Jagger/Richards song As Tears Go By and then became Jagger’s girl-friend for some years — and who is still making fine albums — played Ronnie Scott’s club in London’s Soho.
Now 69, she came on with the aid of a stick, sat for much of the show and still served up a memorable performance. But doctors as well as music fans would have been intrigued. The one-time drug addict told the audience about just some of her ailments, notably a recent broken toe. She could also have mentioned breast cancer, hepatitis C, a fractured sacrum, and a broken hip.
Sitting by me in the audience was another ’60s ‘rock chick’ Anita Pallenberg,72, very much part of the Rolling Stones’ circle back in the day and girlfriend of first Brian Jones and later Keith Richards. She too walked with the aid of a stick and looked the septuagenarian that she is.
Toward the end of her show Marianne Faithfull talked about how tired she was and how there would come a day in the not too distant future when she would want to retire. When the audience groaned, she pleaded: “Oh please let me go when I want to. I’m not Keith!”
The reference to Keith Richards, another former flame, was very pertinent. The Rolling Stones guitarist can look as grizzled as it is humanly possible to look but still play a rock show like he did 50 years ago and command legions of fans worldwide, and have no intention whatsoever of retiring any time soon.
Notice too that while Marianne was absolutely open about their various physical ailments, we’d be hard pressed to name illnesses and problems afflicting her male counterparts. Surely Dylan, Jagger and McCartney can’t have reached their respective ages without some recurring problems. But they keep them quiet. Illness does not go with the image of the male rock star, no matter how old.
The elderly ’60s male stars rock on, and not just those about to earn a fortune at Coachella. The likes of Paul Simon, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, Ray Davies of The Kinks and of course octogenarian Leonard Cohen are all regulars on the touring circuit.
So why are there no women rock stars of that vintage? First and foremost, there were far fewer female pop stars in the ’60s. Nearly all the bands and the vast majority of the solo artists were male.
It took Joni Michell and Carole King at the start of the following decade to show record companies that women could sell records in vast quantities and also that women would buy records.
Also perhaps female musicians are, like Marianne Faithfull, both more honest with audiences and with themselves about the ageing process.
Times have changed to a large degree, and Madonna for example shows no sign of slowing down as she approaches her 60th birthday in 2018. Maybe in 40 years time Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Rihanna, and Lady Gaga will feature in an all-star bill at Coachella.
But history is against them.
