No Longer A Young Man’s Game
Rock and Roll is an old man’s game now. I am generalising I know but look around. The biggest Rock bands in the world have almost always been white and male but now you need to add old into that description. Look at Bruce Springsteen. The Foo Fighters are all at least 50 years old. Hell, Mick and Keef are over eighty. And I know in every city around most of the world you can find young men and women thrashing guitars and pounding drums but I can’t help thinking that rock and roll now days is a genre that has become like the music that was its root stock (blues, country, folk), a genre now fully mature, more important for what it spins off and what it was as compared to what it is. Witness that the biggest news in music right now is that a Black female pop superstar has gone and made a country record or at least a Beyonce version of one.
I am not complaining mind and even if I was, what am I going to do about it? “Time is a motherfucker” is a theme that has been around forever and as Jennifer Egan points out in her great and slightly peripheral novel on rock and roll, A Visit From the Goon Squad,
“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?”
Well, try stopping it.
This was all brought home to me by a visit to the repurposed Northcote Theatre to see Southern Rock veterans Drive By Truckers. After twenty-eight years, fourteen studio albums and many hundreds of live shows you can expect some grey hairs and gentle paunches along with the serious live chops. They’re from Alabama so you might also expect some Lynyrd Skynyrd look alikes and to the extent of a blistering triple guitar line up that is true. Drive By Truckers founders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley have a lot more to say and provide complementary song writing and vocal skills. During their history they have also benefitted from other great songs by former member Jason Isbell, so there is no shortage of quality material and this is a different beast politically from those 70’s southern boogie bands. These songs are decidedly progressive in lyrical content and while they can’t help but acknowledge and reference their roots they don’t endorse the South’s history or wallow in confederate flag revisionism. While I was aware of the band I was there because Marky, who takes his music very seriously and is a big fan, had bought me a ticket. I have to admit while I knew I wouldn’t hate the show I was not sure how much I would like it.
It was a sold out and when I get there I realise everybody there is me. The crowd is not just majority old, white and male but overwhelmingly, 99% so. It was a sea of greying goatees, black band t-shirts and flannel or as the truckers would call it - plaid. In fact, if the old, white male is in fact responsible for everything that is wrong in the world, then it is a pity someone didn’t blow the theatre up last night. Everything would be perfect today.
There were a few women, most of whom looked like slightly unwilling but supportive partners. Hardly anyone one under the age of forty and I saw literally one person who was not Caucasian. In a city like Melbourne, this was to me, very surprising. But then I guess there wasn’t too many of me at Taylor Swift or at the Souledoutfest that my daughter attended on Friday. So horses for courses, as they used to say when rural based colloquialisms still carried meaning. But I digress.
It was a fantastic show, two hours plus of hard rocking, story telling, full of passion, serious guitar work and a punchy but not too flashy light show. Sound was good too and the closing number “Angels and Fuselage” saw a staged closing as one by one, each member left the stage, closing the song with multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez contrasting his earlier fiery slide guitar work with some final reflective piano. Much better than the usual, sometimes contrived calls for and the performance of an encore. Not saying they didn’t deserve it but I think the Drive By Truckers did it right. So I’m glad I went, and during the show I realised that the southern rock label is incredibly limiting. Of course it is there but I was at times also reminded of bands like Guided By Voices, Buffalo Tom, Wilco and The Hold Steady.
A good time was had by all and I had to laugh at some old, stiff bodies, including my own, negotiating the venue’s stairs after standing through the show.
Yep. Time is a motherfucker.
