Some say that pop music has nowhere else to go, but they are wrong: there is still extreme old age to negotiate. This week the American singer-songwriter, activist and folk evangelist Pete Seeger is 90 years old. Fifteen years ago, when he was 75, I’m not sure anyone was paying much attention. Folk music had drifted so far away from the cultural mainstream that search parties had given up for the night and helicopters had been recalled to base. Now, of course, everyone is a folk singer and Seeger is a revered elder statesman, with the satisfaction of having survived long enough to witness the revival of his own folk revival. Forty years ago, as a mere quinquagenarian, he was campaigning for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; now, like all the old hippies, he’s banging on about the environment. The big difference is that more people now are prepared to listen. In 2006 Bruce Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, which was more inspired by the Seeger modus operandi than by his actual songs, none of which appeared on the album. (Nonetheless, it was the first Springsteen album I’d enjoyed for years.) In 2008 Seeger appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman, having for many years being quietly excluded from US television as a dangerous rabble-rousing beardie. Earlier this year he sang Woody Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ at Obama’s inaugural concert in Washington DC. You can’t always vanquish your enemies but you can certainly try and outlive them. Surviving to a great age is the nearest any of us will ever get to having the last word.
Few pop musicians, of course, have a CV like Seeger’s. A youthful Communist, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955 and, possibly most controversial of all, unimpressed by Dylan’s conversion to electrical instrumentation at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, he is surely better known for his political opinions than for having written ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’ or the tune to ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’. It may be that his survival is the best possible advertisement for the health-giving properties of political engagement. (Or perhaps he has just eaten an awful lot of lentils.) But Seeger won’t be the last popular musician to hit 90. There will be others, and one or two of them might still be dyeing their hair black. (Which will make them look nearer 100.) Pop music is only beginning to grasp the nettle of old age. At the moment, the nettle is stinging badly. Maybe gloves should be worn.
For right now, uniquely in pop history, survival really is turning out to be its own reward. Ever since the extraordinary reinvention of Johnny Cash, the industry has been scouting around for long-neglected oldsters who can be given an acoustic makeover and foisted on a new generation who don’t know the difference. When Neil Diamond made his great comeback, everyone fawned and prostrated themselves before the mighty talent who, 40 years ago, had written ‘I’m A Believer’ and, since then, buried itself in mush and cash. Twenty years ago, when reviewing gigs for the Daily Mail, I went to see Diamond at the Wembley Arena, and you have never seen a more complacent, cynical performance by a singer almost sedated by his own marvellousness. Then Rick Rubin records him in a room with an acoustic guitar, a single microphone and a log fire crackling and everything is forgiven? I think not. Now we have Glen Campbell, the original Rhinestone Cowboy, trying the same trick, and Tom Jones has grown a silly little beard and recorded with hip-hop artists, and you just have to wonder who’s next? Englebert Humperdinck? Vera Lynn? Who else is still alive?
So you might not like Pete Seeger’s politics, or his facial hair, or (in my case) ‘If I Had A Hammer’, but at least he has embraced extreme old age with dignity and a coherent sense of who he is and has always been. Maybe folk music prepares you for the twilight years better than some genres. Leonard Cohen, who seems to have been preparing for them all his life, is now a greater star than he has ever been, and without particularly wanting or trying to be. Perhaps that’s the trick: trying to exorcise the wanting and the trying. If you can avoid the dying as well, immortality beckons.
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