My Generation, Past Thirty

ROCK AND ROLL is experiencing the mid-life crisis predicted for it long ago, and old rockers are dropping like stock in the McDonnell-Douglas Corporation. Yesterday was Mick Jagger's 36th birthday. As he ponders how to bow gracefully out of the premier position he's held for over a decade, other performers who have had less of a chance to stockpile tax-free bonds and Krugerrands are struggling to find ways to establish their financial security.

The Who would have won the sweepstakes five years ago for "most likely to burn out," but the Avis of British rock bands continues to plug along--even after the death of Keith Moon. They've added a new drummer and a keyboard man and are touring America this fall.

Unfortunately, their new movie, The Kids Are Alright and its soundtrack album don't nearly do justice to the band's legendary performing style. Peter Townshend plays his guitar by rotating his arm like a vertical helicopter blade; Moon grins and leers through drum solos; John Entwistle, like all bass players, stands expressionless. You can see all this in The Kids Are Alright; but you miss the music. For some reason, Jeff Stein--who put the movie together--chose a few very good film sequences and mixed them up, without any sense of order, with a lot of trashy ones.

YOU'LL SEE MORE performances of "My Generation" than you'll care to count--"My Generation" in front of screaming boppers, circa 1965; "My Generation" on the Smothers Brothers Show; "My Generation" blues-style; and so on. But virtually no tracks from Tommy, Quadrophenia, or Who's Next--except for "Baba O'Riley" and "We Won't Get Fooled Again," the two best sequences in the movie.

Stein doesn't try to show us anything more about the Who than what we already know--that its members are quite ugly, that they can play extremely good music, and that they used to smash their instruments. He couldn't resist putting every Townshend guitar-smashing ever recorded on film into his movie.

The album from the movie has little of interest for anyone who has several old Who albums; it might serve as a good "best of" collection for those who don't. But even in its two-records-for-little-more-than-the-price-of-one format, its chief reason to exist seems to be to make a little more money for the band. Townshend has to keep up his monthly payments to his guru somehow.

Whatever ups and downs in productivity they've had over the years, the Who have never dropped out of the public eye as a major band. The Kinks, who date back as far as the Who or the Stones, made a few hits like "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" and then dropped into cultdom. For many years a small, dedicated audience bought the weird but often witty concept albums they'd put out each year.

A couple of years ago, though, the Kinks signed with Arista and decided to regain some popularity and sales. The double-album rock operas stopped flowing from Ray Davies' pen, and instead out popped instant, catchy, and only slightly pre-digested album sides of five marketable songs.

Low Budget will undoubtedly be a huge success, not least because Davies slavishly follows the formula that made the Stones' Some Girls a successful comeback album. A disco track, "Superman," will spearhead Low Budget's blitzkrieg on the mass market. Another song, "National Health"--with an unadorned bass line and spare mixing--sounds strikingly like the Stones' "Shattered." Several other tracks are fast-paced, punk-influenced ditties. And so on.

WITH THEIR MORE commercial style, today's Kinks are undoubtedly reaching more people, but what they're bringing is not the wonderful old tongue-in-cheek satire Davies specialized in. Instead, these songs are filled with trite statements of no great import--things like:

Nervous tension, man's invention,

Is the biggest killer that's around today

Let the tension out or it will build

And build inside and strike you down someday

"Superman" is funny as far as disco songs go, but compared to "Lola" it's like Steve Martin next to Groucho Marx.

American bands don't seem to have the staying power of the English. Of the great American bands of the 1960s, only the Grateful Dead remain, and they're rapidly fading into an overproduced haze of disco in their studio albums. Oddly, it's Neil Young--the most inconsistent artist around, hopping from drunken, off-key singing on one album to sugar-coated acoustic pap on another--who has brought out one of his best albums, more than a decade and a half into his career.

Young's new album--one side acoustic, the other electric--is the most honest of these three in confronting the horrible personality disorders of the "too old to rock and roll, too young to die" pop star. One song in particular, "My, My, Hey, Hey"--which gets both acoustic and electric treatments--sums up the sentiment of Rust Never Sleeps.

The king is gone but he's not forgotten

This is the story of a Johnny Rotten

It's better to burn out than it is to rust

The king is gone but he's not forgotten

The electric version, in which Crazy Horse--Young's old backup band restored--bleats out a barbaric triplet after each line, sounds eerily nihilistic, as though Young were trying to convince himself that his alternately cliched and obscure lyrics could lead him to some Fountain of Youth for him and his coevals.

Of course they don't, but for now at least Young can still make a good record, and the whole electric side of Rust Never Sleeps sounds better than anything since After the Gold Rush and reminds us that the man who made Comes A Time hasn't completely sold out. The acoustic side, too, has more interesting lyrics and arrangements than Comes A Time, for those who enjoy understated music.

AS TIME GOES ON, the questions that everyone asked as jokes a decade ago are becoming less and less moot. What will Paul McCartney be doing at 50? Touring the Catskills with Wings, maybe making guest appearances at Grossinger's. How will the generation of rockers that entered the field in the mid-sixties meet the twentieth anniversary of their debuts? Nature has solved the problem for many of them in a swift and clean way, of course, but for those who remain alive, existential crises are on the way. If these albums any indication, it will be a long, painfully extended death-rattle for rock and roll, as some artists clutch their ebbing money-making potential, others sell out, and an occasional few burn like supernovae.