Is It Already Ending?

    To my great friends, my music guys…Chow and KMAC: This one’s for you.  

    The term “anitya” refers to the impermanence of all worldly things. It first appears in verse 1.2.10 of the ancient Hindu text Katha Upanishad. Buddhism and Hinduism share this doctrine, though they disagree on whether or not the Self exists. I was first made aware of the term and concept in my 20s. My late father and I were having a nice dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One thing led to another and, wouldn’t you know, a full-blown philosophy discussion ensued. Go figure. He never missed a chance to enlighten me on the wisdoms he had discovered for himself.

    My father, being the hard to follow brilliant man that he was, attempted to emphasize the difference between understanding the reality of universal impermanence as a theoretical proposition—such as one learned in quantum mechanics, astrophysics, or even the history of, what he referred to as, pedestrian entertainment—and grasping it on a more personal level, integrating it into one’s life, and leaving it on in the background like Alexa to monitor and mitigate one’s emotional reactions to life’s multitude of irritations. The difference, my father said, was profound. It was everything.

    At the time, my impulse was to shrug and say, “What the hell are you talking about? So what! Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes, the sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change, but not titanic change. New things replace the old and the world would be a boring place were it otherwise.” 

    Well, as I march along Time’s super-highway with all of its medical and emotional maladies, I’m less sanguine than I used to be about this sort of thing. To some changes, I am reconciled. Others sadden me, but I am trying to accept that it is less than mature to complain. That said, I’m having particular difficulty accepting the slow disappearance and death of a cultural edifice I had always assumed to be eternal…Rock & Roll music; and I am pretty sure I’m not alone in that regard. Many from my generation—fellow Boomers before and currently with me, and Gen-Xers after—seem to also be stuck in that first stage of grief: denial.

    I’m pretty much the same age as rock music. I was born in 1962, among the last members of the illustrious and aforementioned Boomers. (And may I digress for a minute to thank everyone for their kind thoughts and birthday wishes not long ago for this particular boomer. It is not lost on me and it means a lot. The fact that you people read this stuff and also take the time for a Happy Birthday is heartwarming beyond belief. Thank you!) It would only be a few years later that The Beatles would first see Bob Dylan play live at Royal Albert Hall in England. That evening the large encountered the small and something entirely new was created. The story goes it would be the same weekend that Dylan began scrawling the lyrics to Like a Rolling Stone on a napkin at the Savoy hotel—a free-form screed of scornful contempt for his own generation’s Beautiful and Damned, which evolved over subsequent weeks into what is now (statistically, at any rate) the most acclaimed song of all time. Bruce Springsteen once described it as “a torrent that comes rushing towards you. Floods your soul, floods your mind.” And when it was released in July of 1965, it changed everything. That summer, rock ’n’ roll, folk and blues, drugs, poetry, Byronic peacock swagger, disdain and conceit, all coalesced into the greatest sound (well, other than Beethoven) the world had ever heard.

    Of course, it didn’t last. The art historian Kenneth Clark once wrote somewhere that every artistic movement lasts a generation if you’re lucky. You get between 15 and 25 years before the candle begins to meaningfully disappear. 1965–80 is the short rock century. 1955–80 is the long one, if you want to start with The King rather than his Jester. In his 2016 book, Never a Dull Moment, music journalist David Hepworth convincingly places rock music’s peak at 1971 (and in Uncommon People the following year, he dates the end of the rock star to 1994). So by the time I started listening to LPs that belonged to my stepsister and friends’ older siblings in 1974, the bloom was already coming off. Now, intelligent people can disagree here. I’m all in with a current favorite rock band, Pearl Jam, extending that generational timeline. But let us not quibble!

    My first full induction occurred in 1974, when my preacher/Uncle gave me, as a birthday gift, Grand Funk Railroad’s We’re An American Band album. The album, like many albums back then, opened up like a book. Inside there was a picture of the band…naked! Tastefully done of course, but naked enough for my mother to fret about the irreversible changes being made to my 12-year-old brain. I’m guessing that my uncle, a United Church of Christ minister, was unaware of the inside cover! You have to remember, kids, that I was raised on gospel music: The Bill Gaither Trio, etc. I mean, I had already heard secular songs like ‘Smoke on the Water,’ ‘Child in Time,’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ but I was now introduced to ‘Shine on You Crazy Diamond,’ ‘Supper’s Ready,’ ‘Layla,’ and, of course, ‘Free Bird.’ Now add to that this great band with the naked band members on the inside cover! It was like seeing the Taj Mahal, Hagia Sophia, and Chartres for the first time all on the same evening. I have never entirely come down since. The Bill Gaither Trio might as well have gone the way of the dinosaurs for me! But six months later, according to the Clark Formula/Time Frame, it was all over. Rock, like Axl, was a blown Rose. 

    Sure, there were aftershocks–Guns N’ Roses among them, and the aforementioned Pearl Jam. America’s Indie scene produced R.E.M., Pixies, and Sonic Youth, while grunge gave us Nirvana. Troopers like AC/DC and the Stones kept on keeping on like nothing had changed, while a handful of names from the ’70s like Ozzy and Aerosmith enjoyed successful second acts. And may I take a second to mention one of the, if not THE, most underrated bands in American music history that are still doing their thing…LITTLE FEAT! I know, I can't help myself. Anyway, the whole scene increasingly resembled a postmodern pastiche, like the Disneyfied, castrated facsimile of Vegas at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Casino. Springsteen remains a titan, but he is leading a revivalist prayer meeting, not imparting the original revelation. By the mid-’90s, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was honoring talent faster than Rock and Roll could generate it. 

    And now? A few good men have not deserted their posts but they are dying in their boots. The reinforcements never came. “Just about every rock legend you can think of,” Damon Linker wrote in an essay, “is going to die within the next decade or so.” The stats are grim and foretell a “tidal wave of obituaries”:

    Behold the killing fields that lie before us: Bob Dylan (84 years old); Paul McCartney (82); Paul Simon (83) and Art Garfunkel (83); Carole King (83); Brian Wilson (82); Mick Jagger (81) and Keith Richards (81); Joni Mitchell (81); Jimmy Page (81) and Robert Plant (76); Ray Davies (80); Roger Daltrey (81) and Pete Townshend (79); David Gilmour (79); Rod Stewart (80); Eric Clapton (80); Debbie Harry (79); Neil Young (79); Van Morrison (79); Bryan Ferry (79); Elton John (78); Don Henley (77); James Taylor (77); Jackson Browne (76); Billy Joel (76); and Bruce Springsteen (75). We've already lost Tom Petty and Brian Wilson. The deluge has begun.

    A few of these legends might manage to live into their 90s, despite all the, um, wear and tear to which they’ve subjected their bodies over the decades. But most of them will not. “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. And as these totems of cheerfully complacent youth and vitality meet their maker,” Linker writes, it “will force us not only to endure their passing, but to confront our own mortality as well.” (Confronting our own mortality. Ah, there lies the rub.) Concert attendances remain high, but demographics toll the bell. Those tickets, CD sales, and streams are so heavily skewed towards the elderly now that the whole project is just one cold snap away from oblivion.

    Many bands have recovered from the loss of a member, and some have even recovered from the loss of a front man. A dead rock star is one thing—that was always part of the deal. The loss of a generation and a dearth of regeneration is quite another. This is not the death of a chorister, it is the death of the Church. The kids have rejected rock. Country music has somehow maintained its bloodline and even folk and indie still have their breeders. But not rock music. The mosh pit is now reserved for those who can hardly manage the stairs. Which brings me to my personal and somewhat selfish story. 

    Some time ago, I shared some intimations of mortality in this space following a visit to YouTube where I saw a favorite but painfully diminished rock behemoth of my youth and adulthood in its final death agonies. Genesis’ farewell tour was battered—as all such undertakings were at that time—by the capricious surging and subsiding aftershocks of the pandemic. But in their case, it was also compromised by the physical decline of that once-eternal cockney scamp, Phil Collins. Coiled in a wheeled chair, he was now incapable of commanding so much as a tambourine with authority. From a backscreen projection a hundred feet high, he loomed over his assembled fans, spasmodically air drumming and raging against the dying of the footlights. Like King Lear, he defied those loyal fans to notice his lack of sovereignty over the tides of time. It was, however, a grimly dignified—not to mention hugely profitable—reckoning. Genesis had finally reached Revelation.

    But some of those who read my earlier piece came forward to whisper that a “New Hope” did exist—an underground Resistance to the Imperial tyranny of modern pop and the remorseless passage of time. Temporary respite, at least, was to be had in the form of the tribute acts. My reaction to this suggestion was, of course, a resounding NO! Tribute bands are fundamentally childish, as well as some kind of bastardized version of bargaining.

    If there is one thing rock demands, it is authenticity. Cover versions? Yes, of course—a noble tradition. I have spent a decent portion of my adult life sitting in with bands playing covers. Hell, during the late ’90s, Jagger and Co. even performed ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ during their Voodoo Lounge tour, as did Hendrix way back at Monterey. But there is a difference between dropping the occasional nod into a set of originals and make believe. A tribute is a toll paid to the Emperor to continue to enjoy his peace. It is not dressing up in his Purple and prancing around in his shoes.

    “Not so fast,” my friends said. The big-budget shows are now both lavish productions and slavish reproductions, replete with high standards of musicianship and stagecraft. They convince, I was reassured. Given a following wind, you can suspend disbelief for a few precious hours, and once again fill your sails with what Spinal Tap called “the majesty of rock and the mystery of roll,” performed by youthful musicians, not decrepit pensioners. And as an aside…if you’re older, and you love the classic hits genre…watch This Is Spinal Tap. Laugh out loud funny, and much closer to the truth than you might imagine. 

    Well, like Fox Mulder, I remained dubious. Sure, that might work for pop music because authenticity doesn’t matter in pop. “Voyage,” the holographic ABBA extravaganza, felt more like their inevitable destiny than a compromise. So much better than the meat puppet prototype we had to put up with in the 1970s and ’80s. But that couldn’t work for Jim, Janis, Jimi, or The Clash. The Doors were always at least 75 percent a framing device for the possibility of a wardrobe malfunction (and I will go to my grave believing that Jim Morrison, as a songwriter, was an overrated hack). A Clash gig risked becoming an actual riot. If all of that has been pre-programmed into the motherboard, it loses much of its appeal.

    Still, I wanted to believe. Could this be rock music’s Lifehouse or its Mars mission? Terraforming the future with the music of our golden past? Enough moping! And my all-time favorite band, Genesis, I was assured, were singularly well-served by this phenomenon. This made sense. Unlike the Stones or the Doors, golden era Genesis never played off the raw sexual energy or threat of the lead singer. I mean, Steve Hackett played his guitar sitting down, for crying out loud! Their music was almost classical in scope. Ever since the last time I saw them live, my hope that their music could survive the band had been hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway. Just recently, that windshield finally arrived when I went to watch the tribute band The Musical Box perform Genesis’ 1974 double-disc rock opera, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, in its entirety.

    But first, a few notes for the uninitiated. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was the album that broke the original incarnation of Genesis and arguably also ended the First Epoch of Progressive Rock. It remains an endlessly fascinating album. Like almost all the classic double albums of the vinyl era, it is a house of many mansions in which one can get happily lost for hours. And like almost all classic double albums of the vinyl era, it is almost exactly one side too long. (An exception to this rule is Exile on Main St., which is also among the least conceptual albums ever made.) Unusually, there is a fair amount of consensus about which songs should go and which are indispensable. One track, ‘The Carpet Crawlers,’ sits in my most prestigious “Miracle” category, along with ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ ‘Northern Sky,’ and “Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.”

    The album has a peerlessly crazy and confused concept that makes Dark Side of the Moon look positively unambitious. Peter Gabriel was an unusually strange and imaginative lyricist, even by the heady standards of England’s psychedelic era, but The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway reached new heights of bemusing incomprehensibility. Stitching together multiple weird fantasies, allegories, and literary allusions, the story is loosely structured as the passion of a martyred NYC subway graffiti artist called Rael. It is part Pilgrim’s Progress, part The Third Policeman, that great novel by Flann O’Brien and part everything that Gabriel had read or dreamed over the previous 18 months (contrary to popular assumption, he rarely experimented with drugs).

    Concerned that the storyline was still too obscure after the songs were recorded, Gabriel wrote the full scenario out inside the gatefold sleeve, which clarified things in much the same way that poking the mud at the bottom of a pond with a stick clarifies the water. As music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine notes on the record’s allmusic.com entry: “Gabriel made some tentative moves toward developing this story into a movie with William Friedkin (director of The Exorcist), but it never took off, [and] perhaps it’s just as well; even with the lengthy libretto included with the album, the story never makes sense. But just because the story is rather impenetrable doesn’t mean that the album is as well, because it is a forceful, imaginative piece of work that showcases the original Genesis lineup at its peak. Even if the story is rather hard to piece together, the album is set up in remarkable fashion, with the first LP being devoted to pop-oriented rock songs and the second being largely devoted to instrumentals. This means that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway contains both Genesis’ most immediate music to date and its most elliptical.”

    To perform the album Gabriel teamed up with conceptual artist Geoffrey Shaw to devise a stage show that in 1975 wowed critics and fans alike. One described it as “stunning … overwhelming … elevated to an even more exalted level than we’re used to from Genesis.”

    This then, was the show The Musical Box brought to the stage the night I saw them. They certainly recreated the original performances with extraordinary fidelity. Or at least, so I presume—there is little footage of the original show in its entirety, but many stills, and on that basis the recreation was eerily close. And the slideshow projected behind the band—over 3,000 images that included gritty Broadway photo-journalism, Dali oils, and parodies of sexual-health infographics—were all the originals. So is it unfair on the band to complain that the stench of mortality was, if anything, more overwhelming here than at the original Genesis show?

    Yes, it is unfair. Because it wasn’t them. It was us. Even standing outside the theater and seeing oneself reflected in the shiny bald heads stoically shuffling towards the door was enough to wobble the flame. Were these the Carpet Crawlers Gabriel had warned us about? I’d always understood that song to be an allegory for rebirth and reincarnation. But this felt much more cathartic—more like Dante’s Desperados than an endless cycle of life. As one of my fellow pilgrims ruefully observed, this is the stark truth of who we are. This was cognitive dissonance confronting reality, contrary to the self-image in the mind’s eye. Mankind cannot bear much reality, and is generally not expected to fork over a decent sum of cash for such a merciless dose of the stuff when seeking a little escapism on a Saturday night.

    The music was still magnificent, of course, and the performance was exactly as offered. And yet what was implied in the offer—the sizzle, not the steak—was so entirely absent that it was impossible to ignore. The band was playing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 2024 to an audience now as old as their grandfathers were when the album came out. In 1974, huge swellings of sound and orchestral ambition flooded the minds and souls as Dylan once had. But you cannot step in the same river twice. John Cage has famously created concert-hall experiences intended to foreground the ambient acoustics of the hall. But what about the ambient age of the audience? When the landing lights were suddenly beamed at the audience, just as they had been in 1975, they illuminated row upon rows of eggs rather than young shaggy nests.

    Meanwhile, the slide show—again, utterly authentic—was now a dismal, low-fi experience, by comparison with modern light and projection shows. It reminded me of artifacts created by Salvador Dali, such as his “aphrodisiac” tuxedo hung with cocktail glasses. Artworks like that must have once seemed delightfully playful and fresh but now, dusty and faded in the museum, they look like they await a yard sale. The whole experience was a horrible satire, like DaVinci’s old man grotesques.

    The Musical Box are named after one of Genesis’ greatest songs. A bizarre tale about a spoiled Victorian child named Henry, who is murdered with a croquet mallet by his playmate Cynthia, and finds that his soul is trapped inside the eponymous box. The action of the song begins later, when his spirit is inadvertently released by his tormentor. Now, for no obvious reason, Henry’s ghost experiences accelerated aging. As Henry roars through adolescence into manhood and beyond, he beseeches Cynthia to “Let me get to know your flesh.” This alarming expression of illicit desire—peculiar in print, devastating on record—is thwarted by the appearance of the nursemaid before it can be consummated. Or so the program notes claim; the music is ambivalent to say the least.

    Really bizarre. And not to be taken too seriously, right? Fantasy, and barely coherent. But the sense of being too young, and then suddenly, in a moment, too old? That is terrifyingly real. How did Gabriel perceive that terror, at barely 21? A merry old soul, was he?

    Can anything be done to address all this? I have no idea. Perhaps the original audience needs to die. Or at least be barred, to encourage the young to attend. But if current trends are any indication, bands like The Musical Box will be playing to empty venues sooner rather than later. Perhaps Genesis needs to be followed by Exodus—a period of 40 years in the desert during which collective memory can be cleansed of enslavement. Perhaps the task of rescuing and reinvigorating rock music will fall to the Next Generations, should they rediscover the visceral excitement produced by combining a guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, and vocals (and maybe a mellotron and a flute) with the volume of everything cranked up really high.

    Bur for now, I will sit in my agreeably cozy golf room, long after the world has gone to bed to leave me once again with my music, my glass of Bordeaux, and my books. Or maybe watch, through wistful tears, the mesmerizing beauty of the young Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett, and Phil Collins behind the drums, in miraculous 4K on my iMac as they perform live in Paris—in that beatific moment—in 1974. No unfamiliar and intrusive balding heads between me and the band. Except, of course, my own. Anitya be damned. That will never let me down—like the British bandmates of Genesis would say, as sure as eggs is eggs.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com