Philip Marchand: The Greatest Generation fought and died for narcissist Baby Boomers with their "lifestyles"
They’re too old to be boomers, but it wouldn’t have been the same without Mick Jagger (born July 26, 1943), above, or Bob Dylan (May 24, 1941).
The injustice of it all. "I've seen the Stones many times," complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. "I don't feel they play as good as we do. You've got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing."
He could be speaking for members of Guns N' Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree.
Paul McCartney now looks like an old lady, Bob Dylan resembles one of those unfortunates who line up at the Scott Mission, and Mick Jagger looks like his face has not so much aged as congealed, yet they remain irreplaceable icons. What would you rather tell your friends — that you had lunch with Mick Jagger or Joey Kramer?
Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s? I saw playwright Edward Albee in an on-stage interview at the St. Lawrence Centre a couple of weeks ago, and the theatre was full of people who very likely had not seen or read anything produced by Albee in the last 40 years.
But Albee, back in 1962, riveted American culture with his profanity-ridden Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? No dramatic work since has so fascinated and disturbed Americans. Even though there are playwrights working today who are at least as talented as Albee, they don't have his aura. He's like a general at Waterloo or Gettysburg 40 years after the battle. He's a survivor of a period when culture meant something.
This is not baby-boomer nostalgia, even though we are talking about the '60s. Albee is not a baby boomer. Neither is McCartney nor Jagger nor Dylan nor Keith Richards — these rock stars were all born in the early '40s. They were lionized by the boomers, but they were not of them. All the baby boomers did was buy their records and attend their shows.
The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.
It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows.
The world of rock music is one illustration of this phenomenon, but literature provides one even more striking.
On May 21, The New York Times Book Review carried its ranking of "the best American fiction published in the last 25 years." The winning novel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the four runners-up — Don DeLillo's Underworld, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, and John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom tetrology — were all written by authors born in the 1930s. ...
Read entire article at Toronto Star
The injustice of it all. "I've seen the Stones many times," complained Joey Kramer, drummer for Aerosmith, a few years ago. "I don't feel they play as good as we do. You've got one hard-working guy out there and the rest of them are kind of doing their thing."
He could be speaking for members of Guns N' Roses, or Black Sabbath, or Red Hot Chili Peppers, or any number of durable rock groups that have made a substantial mark over the decades. They continue to play their guts out, yet what are people interested in? Keith Richards falling out of a tree.
Paul McCartney now looks like an old lady, Bob Dylan resembles one of those unfortunates who line up at the Scott Mission, and Mick Jagger looks like his face has not so much aged as congealed, yet they remain irreplaceable icons. What would you rather tell your friends — that you had lunch with Mick Jagger or Joey Kramer?
Will we never shake off this damned legacy of the 1960s? I saw playwright Edward Albee in an on-stage interview at the St. Lawrence Centre a couple of weeks ago, and the theatre was full of people who very likely had not seen or read anything produced by Albee in the last 40 years.
But Albee, back in 1962, riveted American culture with his profanity-ridden Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? No dramatic work since has so fascinated and disturbed Americans. Even though there are playwrights working today who are at least as talented as Albee, they don't have his aura. He's like a general at Waterloo or Gettysburg 40 years after the battle. He's a survivor of a period when culture meant something.
This is not baby-boomer nostalgia, even though we are talking about the '60s. Albee is not a baby boomer. Neither is McCartney nor Jagger nor Dylan nor Keith Richards — these rock stars were all born in the early '40s. They were lionized by the boomers, but they were not of them. All the baby boomers did was buy their records and attend their shows.
The real force behind the 1960s revolution was a generation born in the 1930s and, to a lesser extent, in the early 1940s. We speak constantly about the baby boomers and the "Greatest Generation," the veterans of D-Day, but we rarely refer to the generation born in-between.
It was precisely this generation, however, that transformed our culture. From this demographic cohort came the men and women who became the icons of the 1960s and who have had no equivalent successors. They cast very long shadows.
The world of rock music is one illustration of this phenomenon, but literature provides one even more striking.
On May 21, The New York Times Book Review carried its ranking of "the best American fiction published in the last 25 years." The winning novel, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and the four runners-up — Don DeLillo's Underworld, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, and John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom tetrology — were all written by authors born in the 1930s. ...