Artists who take the advice presented in most books on aging and productivity might find something to do at 60 related to but distinct from what they did at 20. Apparently, the artists featured in David Remnick’s Holding the Note: Profiles in Popular Music, didn’t get the memo, for when Remnick wrote the chapters for this book--originally individual pieces featured in The New Yorker--these aging musicians were actively pursuing their original craft.
What compelled them to carry on when their most productive and lucrative years were already in the past? Perhaps because they could still fill amphitheaters, or perhaps because they couldn’t think of anything else to do, becoming, as Remnick describes the Rolling Stones, “unfailing jukeboxes of their earlier selves.” And while he seems to admire Bruce Springsteen’s continued stage athleticism, his take on Mick Jagger’s current antics is not complimentary: “at his best evoking the spawn of James Brown and Gumby, at his worst coming off like someone’s liquored-up Aunt Gert, determined to trash her prettier sister’s wedding with a gruesome performance on the dance floor.”Ouch. Remnick is equally honest—though less snarky—regarding the aging Luciano Pavarotti when he quotes an opera critic from the 1990s who told him that “Pavarotti’s high notes ran out some time ago. Now it’s often a strangled bleat.” Like the Stones, Pavarotti continued to perform, in part, simply because audiences kept purchasing tickets. But he also kept singing opera well past that genre’s normal retirement age because he felt the pressure of being “The Last Italian Tenor.” Similarly, Mavis Staples, the surviving member of a once-crowded family act, sings for the love and the legacy of those who have passed on. The work of late great blues players is ever present in the mind of Buddy Guy, who told Remnick he feels “like one of those aging souls who find themselves the last fluent speaker of an obscure regional language.”
Should aging singer-songwriters please their audiences with their old material, becoming those “unfailing jukeboxes,” or should they please themselves with the creative process? Bob Dylan tends towards the latter, creating entirely new albums—granted, not at his former speed of multiple songs per day---and still fills concerts with (perhaps) disappointed fans aching to hear old songs from their old prophet. Conversely, when stage-shy introverted Leonard Cohen took a lengthy world tour in his later years to recoup what an embezzling employee had stolen, he never stopped composing, but gave his audiences plenty of his old songs (albeit in a different key to accommodate the lower range of his aging voice).
Sir Paul McCartney walks a line between Dylan and Cohen, justifying the creation and performance of what he told Remnick was “wisdom art.” But ever the pleaser, he also gives his audiences “Hey Jude” so that, in his words, “everyone goes home happy.”
Holding the Note lacks the glossy section of photographs so often included at the center of biographies, collective and otherwise, perhaps because Remnick’s writing includes elements that most casual observers might miss in a photograph. For instance, Dylan’s strange Newsweek cover of October 4, 2004, is Googleable (and the story behind it even stranger unless you are aware of Dylan’s narcissistic streak), but Remnick’s description is more detailed, not to mention far more entertaining: “By then he was in his mid-sixties and looked like Vincent Price wearing Hank William’s clothes; pencil mustache, white Stetson, and cowboy suit.”
Anyone can watch Aretha Franklin’s 2015 Kennedy Center performance of “Natural Woman” on YouTube, but Remnick’s description shows more: “Aretha comes out onstage looking like the fanciest church lady in Christendom: fierce red lipstick, floor-length mink, a brocaded pink-and-gold dress that Bessie Smith would have worn if she’d sold tens of millions of records.”
Holding the Note is filled with wit, pathos, sharp observations, profound questions and is well worth a read. (less)
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