When you’re young, you think you’re always going to know every song in the Top 40. You feel pity for the old people who have to ask you what’s playing on the radio. If you think about their tastes at all, you assume they’ve always been this out of touch. Incapable of keeping up since forever. Old even when they were young.
And then one day it happens to you.
One afternoon in late 2001, when I was back in New York for a visit, I was walking east on Seventh Street with one of my old neighbors. A few yards in front of us, five young guys were walking west. They had greasy hair mussed just so, little tiny denim or leather jackets, filthy Chuck Taylors—the neighborhood uniform. They were beautiful, even the one who looked a little like Paula Poundstone. They frightened me, not because I was afraid they’d beat me up, but because they reminded me of my mortality.
My neighbor made what I would call a muffled beeping sound, and then they passed and he exhaled sharply and whispered in my ear: “Did you see who that was?” I said I didn’t. He grabbed at his chest and shot me a gaze of disbelief. “Dave. That was The Strokes.” He turned around. “That. Was. The Strokes,” and then, suddenly bold, he just shouted it out: “FABRIIIIIZIOOOOO!” One of them, Fabrizio I guess, pumped a fist into the air.
Huh. That was the who now?
I looked at pictures back at his place, and his story checked out. That was The Strokes, all five of them, out catting around together in the final moments before they could cat around without security. The Strokes were who the people with their ears to the ground were listening to and talking about at the moment, and while I guess I had heard the name, I hadn’t listened to or talked about them. He burned me a copy of Is This It and I devoured it that very day, mostly out of shame for not having done it already. I loved it immediately, because it is great, but also because I felt like it was my duty to love it. To have missed the new hot thing was bad enough; to miss it, listen to it, and not get it would have been too much to bear. I’d be buying those Rod Stewart Great American Songbook compilations from Starbucks by the end of the week if I wasn’t careful.
The Strokes were the first band to whiz right past me. They had become the biggest thing going, and nobody had bothered to check with me first. It hurt.
They broke down a door, and the kids streamed through it in the months that followed: new bands with creative dress codes and names you couldn’t believe hadn’t been taken yet: The Hives. The Vines. The Killers. The White Stripes. The Black Keys. Jet, for fuck’s sake. There was a rock resurgence, and its sound was inspired by all sorts of things I liked, and then I actually looked at the bands and I realized: Oh, dear God, I am much older than these people. I have as many years on these people as my brothers have on me.
This was the new generation. And I was not in it.
Back in Los Angeles, The Strokes did one of those $2 Bill shows for MTV2, and I was still connected enough at the network to finagle a couple of seats. My friend Brian and I sat in the back, and during “Take It or Leave It,” Julian left the stage and climbed over the crowd, all the way up to our row. A newly minted rock god, standing right in front of me. I stretched out my arms and he grabbed my shoulders, climbed up, and stood right on my lap. It’s on YouTube; if you look closely, you can see me wondering what to do. I had the frontman of the biggest, coolest indie band in the country standing right on my thighs, and all I could do was wonder: Is this the way the kids show disrespect? Is this his way of singling me out? Or is he just drunk? That’s another thing that happens when you age: you can no longer tell when young people are making fun of you.
It can’t be helped. It’s a sense that recedes over time, like all your senses do. I held on longer than most, because it was in my job description for a while, but the reaper comes for everyone. I still looked at Billboard every week, but more and more it felt like an eye chart, and I was quickly losing my vision. First there was a number one single I had never heard (“Bump Bump Bump” by B2K, sometime in 2003; I still don’t know what it is, but I remember it well). Then I had never heard anything in the top ten, and just as quickly I had never heard of anything in the top ten. I saw a trailer for Save the Last Dance and thought “Right, like anyone will pay money to see that,” and it made $30 million in its opening weekend. It hit me: pop culture can produce content without me or my peers in mind, and yet still be very successful.
It’s like an insult from a good friend.
This all happens very quickly, and it doesn’t unhappen. You won’t age into someone else’s prized demographic. (Actually, you will: Fox News’s. Best not to think about it.)
Most people take this in stride. I did not. My entire identity revolved around being on top of pop culture. I had always prided myself on being a step ahead of what people were listening to. It was my superpower, and age was my Kryptonite, and my proof that I lost the battle is that I’m using a Superman reference here instead of a much more au courant Captain Marvel one.
If I don’t know what’s going on in the world of pop culture, who am I?
Now, of course there had always been bands of and for older people, but there was usually something a little embarrassing about them. They were always trying just a bit too hard. I think of the revolving coat rack covered in silk scarves that is Steven Tyler. I think of Mike Love and his repulsive Hawaiian shirts, mugging and pointing through another chorus of “Barbara Ann.” God help me, I think of Cher. (I know, I know, but go see her the next time she mounts a farewell tour; it’s ninety minutes of children dancing around her while she changes clothes twenty-seven times and gay men in velvet jackets rejoice.)
Is this what’s waiting for me?
It’s easier to get old and out of touch in Los Angeles, because in Los Angeles you don’t have to see young people if you don’t want to. You don’t have to see any people. You can hang out in your house and your car and be exactly as social as you want to be. In the early ’00s, satellite radio became a thing, and allowed you to listen only to what you already knew you liked. You could try the pop channel for a while, and then when the sound of being hit about the face with a pillowcase full of silverware got tiresome, you could turn it right to ’80s on 8, and leave it there. You could hear “Walking on Sunshine” again, and it wouldn’t remind you of eighth grade anymore, it would remind you of when you were stuck in traffic on Tuesday. Or you could cut out the middleman entirely, put your iPod on shuffle, and be your own radio station. It’s not what you want for yourself, but it’s comfortable. You can just stop growing and get old and die there in your car and nobody needs to know about it.
I was ready to do that.
I credit Craig Finn with saving my life.
The first Hold Steady song I ever heard was “Stevie Nix” from Separation Sunday, on one of the alternative stations. About a minute in, I pulled over my car and turned it up. It was a glorious mess of bar-band noise and those lyrics. Craig was less a singer at the time than a shouter, and what he shouted could just as well have been notes for a short story: vivid little vignettes about young drunks at rock shows and in ERs. A woman either getting clean or dying at age thirty-three, like Jesus. He wove in old punk bands, Catholic imagery, Fleetwood Mac, Mary Tyler Moore, and Rod Stewart. It was love.
They were playing at the Knitting Factory in a couple of weeks, and I scooped up tickets immediately. And when they took the stage, I had never felt more relieved in my life. They were my age. Praise Jesus, my new favorite band was my own age. So was the crowd: a bunch of weirdos who liked to read books, or who had had Catholic educations, or who just liked to get drunk at rock shows, or all three. The youth are always a minority at Hold Steady shows. We old people run things there.
I did my research on the band, and it turns out Craig Finn went to Boston College, class of 1993. My year. If I’d gone to the school that wanted me instead of begging my way into the one that didn’t, the lead singer of my new favorite band might have been my roommate. (Amy Poehler would have been in our class, too. God help us all.)
Cool grown-up bands appeared or reformed in the years after. The National. LCD Soundsystem. Superchunk got back together. So did Sleater-Kinney. And not for embarrassing reunion tours, like Foreigner or REO Speedwagon or whatever sad-sack old journeymen play the state fair circuit; they got back together and made vital music and rocked the fuck out on stage in their forties, like it was a thing you could do.
It didn’t make me feel young—nothing can do that anymore—but it reconnected me to what made my youth exciting.
And then, in 2015, the Replacements got back together. Even when the Replacements* were together, you never knew how together they were. They were liable to pass out on stage, or vomit, or fight, or break up. The records were great and have stood the test of time. The live shows were performance art.
When the tour dates were announced, every comedy writer in his or her (okay, almost exclusively his) forties took to Twitter to see who else was going, and in how many cities. All of us who’d been faving one another’s tweets and helping to promote one another’s shows made plans to actually meet in person.
And then they took the stage and they seemed to be sober, and the songs sounded a little like they did on the records. They were actually tight, and everyone knew every word, and we all shouted along to “I Will Dare,” a few thousand people whose love of the Replacements sent them on some kind of weird journey that landed them in Los Angeles.
My only complaint with the show was that they didn’t bring up the lights and break us into small discussion groups.
In the twenty-first century, there are bands of people in their forties who are making music that makes my heart swell like it did when I was a teenager.
Someday I’m going to have to accept the fact that I’m old, but it doesn’t have to be today.