LEONARD GRAY

Old man recalls the music of youth What is it with getting older? There’s several old sayings attached to this, and I may repeat a few of them here. However, at the ripe old age of 47, I keep finding myself still enjoying the things more “appropriate” to someone in their 20s. Take for example the music. Now, I was in high school in the late 1960s, which means I enjoyed music popular back then, from the Rolling Stones to the Fifth Dimension to the Strawberry Alarm Clock. Late in my college career at LSU, I was able to get a stint doing college radio for two semesters. I had a popular music show, a classical music show and a comedy show. The popular music show ranged from Heart to the disco-dance music which swept the world. MTV arrived in the early 1980s and I still remember seeing those early, now-primitive, attempts at the music video. Only a handful of musicians tried the new medium and many found new audiences far beyond the sale of LPs. (Yes, children, those were the big discs which came before CDs.) Somewhere in the mid- to late-1980s, MTV got away from the music video formate and added game shows, comedies, cartoons, concerts and other programming which chased me away. At the same time, with the changing fortunes of radio formats, I soon found myself totally out of touch with the rock music of today. I had gotten so far out of touch that I never heard anything of the music and career of the late Kurt Cobain, leading creative force of the early-1990s rock band, Nirvana, until he had already been dead for four years. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, I rediscovered rock music. Not the syrupy mainstream music and not the pop music but the hard-rock music which brought my memories back to the extraordinary creativity of the 1960s – of my high school days. And now I’ve been to two rock music festivals in New Orleans and plan to attend my third next month. While many of my generation are stuck in the 1960s or 1970s, I find myself listening to music from Limp Bizkit, Staind, Papa Roach, Crazy Town, Nine Inch Nails, Nirvana, Saliva, Seven Mary Three, Garbage and Creed. What makes me feel good about attending rock festivals, surrounded by thousands of other fans half my age, is that I’m not the only one of my generation there. A lot of parents do show up, drawn by the same creativity they remember from their own youth. Not all of it is good, of course. Not all of the music of the 1960s was good, either. That was a decade which made stars of a group of actors (“The Monkees”) and a group of cartoon characters (“The Archies”). LEONARD GRAY is assistant managing editor of L’Observateur.