Old Enough

 Pursuing my exercise with my headphones in my ears, I was given the gift of hearing Roger Daltrey singing these words: "Hope I die before I get old." I will soon be turning sixty, an age that I did not fully comprehend or imagine becoming at any point during my "youth." I suppose for our purposes here I will define "youth" as being any time before twenty-five. Years old. Since that time I have made a series of nearly constant adjustments to my perspective. I moved out of my hometown when I turned thirty, so that moment had a bit of "coming of age" to it. A couple years later I got married and brought a whole new wave of grown-up with it. The arrival of our son not long after that gave me a new way to calibrate relative youth, since I now had a youth of my own as a relative. 

Roger Daltrey is seventy-eight years old. He was twenty-one when he stuttered his way through "My Generation." I was three. It would be another eighteen years before I would start considering the irony of recording a song like that and then continue to play it, record more music, go on tour and perform that song as part of a greatest hits package for another fifty-seven years. While it is true that Keith Moon, Roger's bandmate and drummer lived (died) up to those expectations, and the departure of bassist Jon Entwistle twenty years ago suggest that Rog may not have been listening to the words he was singing, but maybe the other guys felt the need to save face. Of course, it was Pete Townshend who wrote the words so very long ago, about not hanging around too long at this party we call life. Pete is fast approaching his seventy-seventh birthday. A great many years ago, he wrote about Mick Jagger turning forty. The lead singer of the Rolling Stones is the same age as Roger Daltrey. Maybe there was something in the water way back then. In 1975, Mick told an interviewer about "coming of age" in rock and roll: "I would continue to write and sing, but I’d rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45.” 

If you're curious, I've already done the math. That was forty-seven years ago. On November 21, 2021 Mick and the boys played "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" for their final encore at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. That performance came just a month after the death of their drummer, Charlie Watts. Considering Charlie made it all the way to eighty, it seems unlikely that he went out in a cocaine and whisky fueled frenzy. He did not burn out, but it's fair to say that he didn't exactly fade away. He just stopped rocking and rolling. 

So maybe there's something in there about money and fame making liars of us all. Me? I'm not rich or famous so I will probably find my own path, using that old axiom, "You're only as old as you feel." Somedays I'm ninety-five. Other's I'm back in my prime. Those are the days I'm listening to DEVO. Mark Mothersbaugh is only seventy-one.