Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
When The Beatles released “When I’m Sixty-Four” in 1967, Paul McCartney was 25 years old. Right around that time, a popular phrase that circulated was, “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Seeing as I was 10 at the time, that felt plausible to me — but then, what did I know? For that matter, what did Paulie know about being 64?
64 is twice 32, so was one to doubly not trust anyone over 60? But Paul’s lyric is full of whimsical questions: “If I’ve been out ’til quarter to three, would you lock the door?”, signaling that this was not a song about political mistrust, but a light-hearted romp into the imagined future of one Sir Paul (currently 78, in 2021). In that age of “live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse,” living to reach 64 seemed absurd.
By age thirteen, I certainly did not trust anyone over 60, but that is fodder for another essay.
I will turn 64 this May. Before COVID, as we say, I had begun formulating plans for writing a musical revue for my birthday celebration that probably would place The Song near the end of the show, and once again invite my musical pals to join me onstage to try our hands at my arrangements. Celebrate the sixty-fourthness of it all with some good old Boomer tunes and some more contemporary pieces thrown in! I was planning a self-indulgent jukebox, not limited to Zappa music the way my 60th birthday was. It would be an hour-long joyride through some of my favorite tunes.
Well, COVID has closed all the local music venues, at least for the time being, and they won’t be back in time for me to be singing about Vera, Chuck and Dave to an audience when The Dreaded Day comes. Any crocus-like signs of musical life returning here in Somerville this Spring are accompanied with restrictions: NO SINGING. NO WIND INSTRUMENTS. So, no birthday gig/party either, I guess. Not the one I wanted, anyway.
Speaking from my experience, people who are my age are certainly not young — and yet, there is a strange double-standard at work here. Last fall, one of my best friends from high school died of a heart attack. Our collective reaction at the time was, “He was so young. He was TOO young.” You see the paradox? Even though my generation has aged beyond “youth”, dying at this stage of our lives feels like “dying young.” This flies in the face of the basic truth of life, which is that anything can die at any time, regardless of age.
I believe this stems from some sort of expectation in our culture that, provided the creek don’t rise and drown us all, we’ll survive to a “ripe old age” to our “golden years” and fade off into the sunset, hopefully in our 80s or 90s or beyond. Verbal tic? Wishful thinking? Denial? Eisenhower propaganda? But: every one of the moments that we’ve lived has brought us to this one right now, and here we are, we’re still us. I personally don’t experience my thoughts and feelings as being “older”, I’m still the kid I was when I was a kid. My eyes have just seen more highway pass under them, is all. I probably have a better vocabulary by now as well.
A really dear friend died two days ago. Because their family is very private, I am using very general language to describe my friend. My friend was maybe a year older than me, which causes me to react to their passing as being unfair and too soon. They were so young. They were too young.
Their death is unfair because their body failed them in a strange and unexpected way that has nothing at all to do with COVID. This makes me think that their passing would have happened despite the pandemic. I would have been no less shocked, no less grieved, no less powerless, had there been no pandemic.
This is a person who played a part in a very transitional period of my adulthood. I have a tremendous amount of respect and love for this person, and I miss them terribly.
I wake up some mornings contemplating the sixty-fourness of it all. Ten years ago, my kid Johnny and I started the Johnny Blazes and the Pretty Boys band, and I dusted off my disused Berklee horn arranging skills and started off doing things the old-fashioned student way: writing out parts by hand on physical pieces of paper. Before too long, the band grew in size, and I realized that using Finale and publishing PDFs to Dropbox was much more efficient and pretty much expected. Here we are, ten years later, dozens of charts and some good gigs behind us, some life tragedies as well. The band now is in stasis, on ice — no weekly rehearsals any more, but the charts give the promise that we could revive the project at any moment, except: we’re in a world where there are no venues to perform in, and if there were, we wouldn’t be allowed to sing or let the horns play. At least not as things stand today.
Is this what sixty-four has in store for me? I want to fight it. I still want to play shows, one way or the other. I want to rage against the dying of the light. I want music to be heard, and I want to be a part of it.
I believe that this pandemic is causing a tremendous, pent-up, deferred need for people to be amongst each other once again, to share art and music and theater and cinema again, even if it is with new conventions, even if it is in new formats, even if it is in reduced numbers, but numbers nonetheless. I long for the return of events like Honkfest, where wind instruments brazenly belch clouds of human breath from their concentric innards — right out there in the streets! Aimed at your face! I long for being on stage while the sax player stretches out. I can’t wait to hunker down outdoors at a summer festival, jamming under the stars on acoustic instruments until damn-near sunup. I usually fold before dawn.
I long for all of that. But I really wish my friend who just left us was still around to be part of it too. And, in my grief-bargaining way, I wish I could say some of the things that were left unsaid.
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