Rock and Roll and Aging
People sometimes ask me, “How come you don't sing anymore?” Huh? I sing all the time. At the moment, it's just not an organized effort. I sang for my parents. I sing for myself. I'll sing to the kitchen sink, the rabbits, my car, the bedroom walls. It doesn't matter. It's sort of like intermittent breathing; I sing because I'm alive. I just don't feel like repeating myself anymore by doing the same material every night onstage. Performing again wouldn't be fair to an audience, because most of them want to hear the old favorites, which I don't want to sing, and I'd be saying, “I don't do any of that stuff, you only get new material.”
Oh really, you selfish ASSHOLE.
When they decided to repeat Woodstock a few years ago, I was asked to participate. I refused, because I believe some things, although they may have worked beautifully the first time, simply can't and shouldn't be redone. As far as I'm concerned, that was the trouble with Altamont, but I didn't watch the latest Woodstock, so I can't venture an opinion about whether or not it was any good. I just know that even in your prime, when you go onstage every night to perform, you have to repeat yourself, anyway. After twenty-five years of performing, the idea of not only singing the same old songs, but actually trying to do that in the context of the same concert, is not all that appealing. But that doesn't mean my love of music has changed.
Cher on tile. (Justin Davis)
My adhesion to music goes from a Band-Aid all the way through the complete body cast—from the scrape or gash that propels the shout, to the iodine and sutures of putting it down on paper, to the physical therapy of getting the kinks out onstage. And somewhere in there is my favorite part of the artistic healing process: the recording studio. This is the place where I get to build the idea and the sound, using the machinery to balance the original expression.
Even without the reward of distribution, just making a song is something I've always loved. And in the studio, I cherished the luxury of being able to keep doing it until it was right. The input of musicians, producers, and engineers was like having professional ears attached to personal friends who knew how to translate my sometimes sketchy ideas. I'd walk in with a piece of paper that had some words and chord changes written on it, and a few or several hours later, I'd emerge with a full cast of musical characters who'd come together in the desire to “say” something aural and let it be heard by millions (hopefully) of people.
Today, I'm in love with what I can create outside myself—something that doesn't involve my appearance— like painting, drawing, sketching, sewing, interior design, writing, playing piano for my own amusement, good conversation, philosophy, spirituality, just lying around, thinking. And since professional recording is presently a thing of my past, instead of music, I now use color in the form of pastels to show how I think and feel.
Because I only do a drawing once, each piece is an expression of how I am at that point in time. Kinko's can take care of repetition if it's needed or warranted. Anyway, I consider performing rock and roll to be a young person's game. Old farts leaping around, trying to hang on to their flapping skin, is not an uplifting experience for me, either to watch or perform. There are certain kinds of performances that simply don't lend themselves to wrinkles. Like hard rock.
With classical music, it doesn't matter how old you are. The formal, sit-down attire combined with the music itself makes it appropriate for an aging ensemble. But hard rock? Picture spandex on Ted Koppel, or Newt Gingrich behind a drum set. Hideous, right?
That doesn't mean I think everybody over the age of thirty ought to give up; it's just my take on the situation. If you don't mind geriatric rock, that's fabulous. It'll buy Grace Slick a home in Saint-Tropez if you continue to show up at concerts in throngs of thousands and give up your forty dollars a head to listen to a fifty-eight-year-old woman say, “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”
That was okay in 1969. But would you buy that now? Maybe I could be the first rocker to have a bedpan roadie, an oxygen unit onstage between songs, a change of Depends, and a Count the Liver Spots contest, or …
Give rock and roll back to the kids, and make sound-track instrumentals like a good old rascal.
That's my opinion of geriatric guys making music. So what about listening to it? At first, in 1990, when I stopped the business end of rock and roll, it was hard to turn on the radio without being heavily judgmental: “If only the bass were louder, the harmony is off, put echo on that screechy voice, turn down the top end,” and on and on.
I couldn't seem to just listen. But after a while, I was able to enjoy music without getting my “professional opinion” all over it. Today, I like listening to the radio because they play things I'd never hear unless someone else was making up the playlist. If I solely listened to my own tapes, it would be Gipsy Kings over and over. Radio gets me out of my own rut. But if I had Bill Gates's cash, I'd hire a guy to wander around beside me, playing flamenco music on a daily basis. It wouldn't just be a rut, it would be Iberian overkill—España locura me (“Spain crazy I am”).
I won't say a final no to ever making music again. I have trouble saying no to anything, but if I decided to perform again, it wouldn't be in the same context as I've done for the last thirty years. Maybe a hellish little set at the Shady Pines nursing home would be in order. Me and Martha Stewart on cocaine doing a Sid Vicious lullaby. Vocals without music, spoons beating on bedpans.
It could happen.
Let me clarify my point. If you're a woman who's over fifty and have had no plastic surgery, put a mirror flat on the floor beneath you, take off all your clothes, and try getting down on all fours. One quick glance at the mirror will show you how the woman-on-top position looks to your partner. Gravity has pulled your sagging skin into the terrible folds of a Shar-Pei dog, your features are distorted by the inevitable droop, and your ego accurately tells you, “That's not who I am!” In the spiritual sense, all that floppy meat is not you, but in a physical sense, we do have eyes, and that reflection in the mirror is hard to dismiss with a load of cosmic platitudes.
“Return to Sender” (Grace Slick)
Black comedy: the wiser you get on the inside, the uglier you get on the outside. People who're trying to be polite, or simply displaying a lot of denial about aging, will say, “Yes, but she has that glow that makes her lovely.” True, a happy gramma looks slightly better than a morose old woman, but ugly is ugly.
Not good or bad, just flat-out ugly.
Some of the world's great gurus have beautiful things to say about living, but they generally look like shit. You may have seen them, the toothless degenerating fat old monks with acceptance written all over them. Do we love them? Sure. Are their bodies attractive? No.
And another thing—why is it that Cher and I are the only nonpracticing comediennes who've admitted to thoroughly disliking the physical aspect of aging? It's not going to make me do any cliff-diving, but I'd prefer to look as good as I feel. I'm not going to don the flowered chiffon dresses that are considered appropriate for a woman my age, but I'm not piercing my body parts to be au courant, either.
The trouble is that the Ruth Gordon–type character is much beloved if she's seventy-five or eighty, but fifty to sixty is a midrange, with no discernible margin for eccentricity (without looking like a nut case). Think of any fifty-five-year-old woman you know. Is she exhibiting outlandish attire or behavior? This age group that I'm now a part of is a peculiarly conservative group, unwilling or unable to jump out of its own self-inflicted rigidity. We run companies, dress acceptably, and pander to our children's concepts of who they want us to be. We're chattel who've crawled back into the brittle dialectic handed down by our parents.
Myself, until I figure out a personal, creative alternative to body piercing, I'll continue to persist in the anonymity and comfort of sweatpants, and I'll be just another slob at the supermarket, picking up a six-pack of V8. The Joan Collins getups take too much time, and unless there's a point or a reward, I'm not interested in spending hours every day at a makeup table or in my closet, choosing the right outfits. It isn't worth it; the best response Joan can hope for is, “My, she looks good for her age.” That's not enough of a reaction to get me rooting around at Neiman Marcus. However, if men suddenly got seriously enamored of old broads, that might be enough of an incentive for me to play with my credit cards. Since that probably won't happen, who cares? Dressing for other women (my Chanel is better than your Donna Karan) is what's left for the old-timers. Men could care less what a sixty-year-old woman is wearing.
All that said, it may be that there's a method to the madness—a point to aging and the deterioration that comes with it. The Buddhists have proposed a loose block of time frames and the appropriate conduct to be carried out in each stage of life:
The first—from birth to the age of twenty— is the learning time, when we're taught by elders about the social and intellectual ways of our own particular culture.
The second—between the ages of twenty and forty— is the time of action. We have our babies and make our way in the world, caring for the very young and very old, making “right livelihood.”
The third—between the ages of forty and sixty— is a shift into study and inquiry. We amass information and prepare for the next phase.
The fourth—from the age of sixty on—is a gentle time of going inside, learning to laugh at the poignant struggle of everything in form, and listening for the call to transition.
Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher whom I greatly admire, took care of his father in the final stages of his life. Relatives would come to visit in the hospital, put on a happy face for the old man, then go out in the hall and say, “He's not like he used to be. He's so quiet—he just sits there looking out the window.” They were used to the gruff, driven, aggressive tycoon he used to be. But Ram Dass said, “I've never felt so close to my father. I take care of his needs and we just sit there quietly, appreciating the scenery and enjoying each other in a way we were never able to do when our goals were so polarized.” His father was turning inward, becoming reflective, and waiting, with no particular attitude, to die.
The opportunity to “go out” by closing down peacefully is almost as good as just going to sleep one night and not waking up. (Although “waking up” on a spiritual level is exactly what we might be doing at that point, according to some theologians.) I'm not interested in leaving the Earth just yet, but there are compelling reasons for working with the loss of the senses rather than against it.
For starters, when your hearing and sight fail, that's the perfect time for meditation. There are no distractions and mobility is limited—it's a good time to sit in meditation practice, slowly getting used to being spirit without form. Sounds like a hard thing to do if you're busy hanging on to who you used to be. But we do have choices. We can go nuts over not being able to go bowling any more, swallow some Drano and get it over with, or relax into the silence and touch places we missed when we were so busy yelling “Strike!” the other realms of being simply escaped our attention. I like to think I'll take the latter path. The high road, so to speak.
Then again, when the time comes, I might freak out and demand to be hooked up to every prosthetic device known to man: industrial-strength hearing aids, synthetic corneas, a plastic gall bladder, morphine and vitamin IV drips, a Mae West jacket, a Maserati wheelchair, a colon bypass uplink—the whole robot kit strapped onto my rotting frame.
It's not a pretty picture, but the entertainment value has enormous possibilities.