Hope I Get Old Before I Die
Why Rock Stars Never Retire
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Abbey Road and Never a Dull Moment, the basis for AppleTV's 1971 documentary, come the stories of how rock icons like Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and more have survived, thrived, and remained the most powerful forces in music.
When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July of 1985, we thought he was rock’s Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown, he—and many others of his generation—were just getting started.
This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the ’60s and ’70s exploited the Age of Spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honor in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else in the business had retired.
This is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up a Nobel Prize, The Beatles become, if anything, bigger than The Beatles, and it’s beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks in a large part to technology, be playing in Las Vegas forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rock 'n' roll has been transformed from the wild music of youth into a genre dominated by elder statesmen who traffick in nostalgia, according to this fine-grained history. Music journalist Hepworth (Never a Dull Moment) traces the start of rock's "third act" to the 1985 Live Aid concert held at London's Wembley stadium, where such bands as Queen drew a massive transatlantic TV audience, whetting appetites for "large spectacle" concerts that allowed fans to feel they were part of "something bigger." That set the stage for a wave of older rockers (including the Rolling Stones and Paul McCartney) to embark on seemingly endless world tours, capitalizing on nostalgia to make money off rereleases and cement their legacies in the newly established Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The author skillfully breaks down how such changes have turned rock into "the very thing it was supposed to be an alternative to," as aging musicians try to fulfill a desire for something that's beyond music—"a sense of connection that was established at a young age" for older fans, and for younger ones a window into a mythical scene that "they couldn't help but feel they'd missed out on." The result is a revealing and richly detailed look at rock's ongoing evolution.
