I wrote most the following right after those first videos of Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival were posted. Of course, she just performed at the Grammys. Looked a little slicker than Newport, but you get the idea.
Like a lot of other people, I got very weepy watching the videos of Joni Mitchell performing at the Newport Folk Festival.
But then I fell into gloomy thoughts about the paradox of the aging artist.
We all understand that physical decline is inevitable. No one is to blame for getting old.
So it’s always moving when a great artist puts this deterioration on display.
You can watch clips of Fred Astaire dancing at the 1970 Oscars. The whole effect is very deliberate. He is old. We all know he’s old. Nobody is trying to hide it. We can see that his body can’t do what it used to do. But he dances anyway.
And it seems that his elegance is almost more evident than ever in how he pulls it off.
The feebleness of his body makes it easier to see that Fred is still in there. It makes you think of Yeats’ lines:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
You can see Fred’s soul more clearly because you see how his body is just a puppet. He looks more like Fred Astaire than Fred Astaire precisely because he doesn’t dance as well.
And this effect is very pronounced in Joni’s performance because her condition has profoundly deteriorated.
When her voice cracks on the high notes, you somehow see more than ever that Joni is still “in there.” She sounds more like Joni than Joni because she doesn’t sing as well.
And our role, as audience, is to react to the shortcomings as though they were on the same level as past greatness.
We can see that one of Fred’s spins is a little clumsy, a little sluggish, but cheer as though it is the smoothest he’s ever executed.
We can hear that Joni misses the note, but cheer as though it’s the sweetest one she’s ever sung.
I just saw a video on Instagram where an old man slowly, slowly, SLOWLY shuffles to the end of a diving platform maybe twenty feet above the sea.
It’s not like he’s about to swan dive off a high cliff.
He hesitates at the edge for a moment with his protruding belly. Then he leans out and falls like a sack of potatoes. He enters the water with an approximation of a dive.
Naturally, the caption is very sentimental about how it was inspiring to see this old guy dive into the ocean.
What if the video had just been a 35-year old man clearly in average good health? And what if the caption for that picture was just “took a video of some random guy jumping off this diving platform.” And there’s no back story to give it meaning. Nothing about how he’s facing his demons by diving twenty feet into the ocean.
Oh … and no sentimental music.
No, he’s just an average guy performing a mediocre dive. Why post such a video?
But an 80-year old guy flopping into the water is a miracle!
My gloomy point about all of this is that Joni Mitchell is only 22 years older than me.
Which means that I’m only 22 years away from being old enough that people might lose their shit if I play the most basic blues lick on my guitar.
Of course, I’m not Joni Mitchell. I didn’t write and record Blue. So who’s to say that ANYBODY will ever “celebrate” me.
I’m just saying that in a mere 22 years, if someone does celebrate me like Joni, I will be old enough that no one will expect me to be competent. In fact, the worse I do whatever I’m doing … playing the guitar probably … the louder they’ll cheer.
My point is that if they had a celebration of Kenny Nowell this weekend, no one would cheer if my guitar playing sucked.
But in only 22 years, I can suck and people will give me a standing ovation.
Let’s put it this way. In 22 years, if I have to be helped to a chair and have difficulty playing a simple song on my guitar, no one will think that it is abnormal or tragic. Not particularly. Everyone will think, “Of course, he’s playing in the wrong key and off beat: he’s 80.”
In 22 years. Only 22 years.
Of course, we do the same with children. We enthuse to high heaven over some little girl warbling an atonal version of some Disney song. We give a participation trophy to a team of kids who didn’t hit a single ball the whole season.
We claim to do it to build children’s self-esteem. But we really do it to ensure that our over parenting doesn’t wreck their self-esteem.
My parents didn’t force us to do much of anything. And the question of whether I was good or bad as Little Sure Shot when we played Sergeant Rock in the big field never came up. Self-esteem wasn’t a factor.
But little Oscar knows he sucks at violin. He may be four, but he’s not an idiot. Yet listen to these bullshit grownups cheering after I totally butchered “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
First they stick me in these awful lessons with this awful instrument, so that I can do nothing but catastrophically fail. Then they think by lying to me that I didn’t sound like shit I won’t internalize my failure.
We overpraise older people for worse reasons.
My cynical view is that these Newport moments are a kind of ritual where younger people try to make up for the fact that they are otherwise annoyed by old people.
I prefer to use the self-checkout at my local grocery store.
Due to some deep-seated impairment, I am absolutely incapable of shopping for more than one day at a time. So I go to the grocery store almost every single stupid day of the week.
Which means that I use the self-checkout almost every single stupid day of the week.
Which means that I’m probably the fastest user of self-checkout in all of Park Slope, if not the entire borough of Brooklyn.
Yet, if the store is crowded, I can see people fidgeting and shaking their heads as this decrepit old man “holds up the whole world” while he fumbles getting his avocadoes on the scale.
Oh, the injustice that services like the self-checkout are democratic and allow the slow and feeble to ruin everyone else’s lives wrestling with futuristic technology like a grocery scanner!
And, if the next person in line is some 30-year old white guy, oh boy, he rushes up as I’m leaving like “Here’s how ya do it, grandpa!”
Of course, the robot voice immediately chides him for some stupid mistake: “Please remove the unscanned item!”
Yeah, asshole, you’ve got to SCAN the item before you just throw it down. Duh.
But he’ll still bump past me trying to get out of the store as though all of the “old people” in the world are blocking him from living his best life.
Why don’t people treat ME like Joni Mitchell when I’m at the self-checkout? Look, he’s waved that carton of milk over the scanner twenty times with no luck. Beep! He got it! What a hero! What an inspiration! Good thing I filmed this old man successfully scanning a carton of milk. Let me put some plaintive piano music under it and post the clip on Instagram with an inspiring title!
And this is all so stupid because I’m only 58. If you’re 58, you know that 58 isn’t that old. If you’re 72, you know that 72 isn’t that old.
I’ll speak to my 93-year dad on the phone. He’ll make morbid jokes about how he probably won’t be around much longer. But I can still tell that 93 doesn’t seem that old to him.
Everyone is about 25 in his own head.
But karma is a bitch. Every time I feel that someone is treating me like an old man, I remember how I treated older people.
For example, I recall being in my 20s and needing a singer for our band. I had met this cool guy at a songwriting event. We hung out a bit. I thought his singing was a great match.
The band was playing melodic power pop. This guy’s voice was a bit like Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues. A bit like Neil Finn, who sings “Don’t Dream It’s Over” for Crowded House. A moody tenor who could cut through an aggressive indie band.
He wrote great songs. He liked all the right bands. And he was really nice.
The only thing was, he always wore a bandana on his head. A kerchief. It was easy to guess the obvious – that he was losing his hair.
Finally, he came to the studio. It sounded great. Perfect.
But still … that bandana.
Eventually, he mentioned his age. 33!
He was 33. And we, only 6 or 7 years younger, felt despair. As good as he was, as perfect as he was, his great age would surely ruin our chances for fame and fortune.
So we passed. We passed on a perfect singer because he was 33.
If we saw a 33-year old as over-the-hill, wow, what the hell do I look like to people, standing there at the self-checkout at 58 with my big white beard?
But thankfully, now and then, there’s a first dance at a wedding or the right moment in a karaoke bar when we can expiate our guilt by cheering as some old man does a tango or some old woman sings “thunder only happens when it’s rainin’.” The old man’s legs are wobbly. The woman’s voice is thin and reedy. But, oh, how we clap and yell and hoot.
Yes, we balance the scales.
Kenny Nowell 