Time waits for no one
Every time the Rolling Stones hit the road or otherwise defy all expectations that they’re still sentient and still a functioning unit, headline writers inevitably work in a reference to the band’s 1965 hit “Time Is On My Side.”
And even as the band is on the verge of releasing its first new studio album in 11 years and 73-year-old Mick Jagger is on the cusp of becoming a father yet again, this time with his 29-year-old girlfriend, there’s another Rolling Stones song that almost certainly has come to take on added weight for the generations that have followed the group since they released their first single 10 presidencies ago – “Time Waits for No One.”
Even though the Stones still diligently pound out “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” to stadium audiences – despite the fact that Jagger once said “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m 45” – time has run out for a number of the band’s peers.
Many of the greats of that same groundbreaking musical cohort are already long-departed, having been claimed young by self-indulgence and misadventure, like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, or by random lunacy, like John Lennon. But at what appears to be an intensifying pace, the musicians who animated audiences in the 1960s and 1970s, and helped define those times, are exiting thanks to the mundane afflictions that hobble most other mortals at the end of their lives – heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, and on and on.
Late last week, word emerged that Leonard Cohen, the much-garlanded Canadian singer-songwriter who penned much-covered tunes like “Hallelujah” and “Bird on a Wire,” died of unspecified causes at the age of 82, just two weeks after releasing what turned out to be his final album.
Then, on Sunday, there was the news that Leon Russell, the long-haired, white-bearded keyboard player who sang alongside George Harrison and Bob Dylan at “The Concert for Bangladesh” in 1971 and has the songs “This Masquerade” and “A Song for You” to his credit, died in his sleep at 74. They are the latest additions to a 2016 roll call that already includes David Bowie, who died of cancer at age 69 when the year was just 10 days old (and two days after he released a new album); Merle Haggard, claimed by pneumonia on his 79th birthday; Glenn Frey of the Eagles, another pneumonia victim; George Martin, the Beatles producer who took his leave in his sleep at age 90; and Bobby Vee, the early 1960s hitmaker who succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease at age 73 Oct. 24.
As the years unfold, the “Rock and Roll Heaven” that the Righteous Brothers sang about is bound to have even more of a “helluva band” than the one that’s already in place as more classic rockers ride into their sunset years.
This has to be a sobering realization for baby boomers who have done everything to extend their youthfulness into the phases of their lives when their forebears readily surrendered to grandparenthood and the easy chair.
Television commercials might show idealized images of sixtysomethings and seventysomethings playing tennis, traveling to exotic locales or hitting the gym, knee and hip replacements have made them more mobile than their cane-wielding elders, and various pills and potions have extended their sex lives, but the Grim Reaper can’t be kept at bay permanently.
And keep this in mind: Even if Jagger is uncommonly athletic as he struts in the spotlight during Rolling Stones concerts, he is also a great-grandfather.
Time does, indeed, wait for no one.