August 6, 2004

Pop Music That's by Geezers and for Geezers as Well as Youth

ver here at the Sunshine retirement home in South Florida we got all excited the other day when we read that Jimmy Buffett had placed his new album, "License to Chill," at the top of the Billboard magazine album chart — exactly 30 years after first appearing there with "Living and Dying in  3/8 Time," which peaked, as they say at Billboard, at No. 176.

What a triumph for us geezers, and for geezer rock! Pop music is routinely perceived or dismissed as youth music, and barely pubescent youth music at that. Here today and gone tomorrow, or at least gone into the file of potential "where are they now" television shows. But here's Mr. Buffett, plugging away in Margaritaville, and darned if he doesn't top the charts.

Keeping with Mr. Buffett's preferred Key West imagery, it may be that he lucked out a little, catching the chart in a trough between the cresting waves of bigger-selling CD's. He sold 234,000 copies in the United States of his album, but that's hundreds of thousands less than some artists sell in their first week out. And Mr. Buffett lasted only a week at the top, bumped by Jessica Simpson's kid sister Ashlee, who sold 398,000 copies of her "Autobiography." The younger Ms. Simpson is 19; Mr. Buffett is 57. Still, No. 1 is No. 1.

The idea that pop music is only for the young is simply wrong, meaning at odds with the facts both past and present. Yes, from Rudy Vallee and Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley on, youth has had its idols, and some of those idols fade just as rapidly as the youth of their fans.

But music then and now is made as much by professionals as by eager quasi-amateurs. Blues and country musicians grew honored with wizened age. They toured and they made records, some of them selling out big theaters and even arenas, others trudging along the club or roadhouse circuit, but always making music and giving people pleasure. Just like Mr. Buffett.

The last time I encountered him was five summers ago at, of all places, the Bohemian Grove, that secretive hideout for the WASPy rich and famous in its own towering stand of redwoods up by the Russian River, north of San Francisco. Mr. Buffett sang his songs, and the assembled men (no women at the Grove, except now as waitresses) sat there in their arboreal amphitheater and enjoyed him, even though for half the audience he was a memory from their youth and for the other half an unknown young pup.

Pop artists who last into old age, still playing before the public, tend to settle into a groove. Or a rut, if you're feeling pessimistic. Chuck Berry is famously cynical about his art and his audiences, coming into town alone, cursorily rehearsing with whatever pickup band is on hand, demanding his cash in advance, cranking out his oldies and getting out of town as fast as he can. But his oldies are still great and he cranks them out pretty well.

To last, an artist has to love to tour, or at least accept it as a job that must be done. James Taylor, who made it to No. 4 on the chart with his last album, gets genuine pleasure from performing. You can see it from his shows, but I also know this because I know him and because his wife and his fellow singers tell me so.

The phenomenon of old singers reaching new heights (for them) of popularity is not simply a question of baby-boomer singers and audiences growing up together, getting used to each other, but it's partly that. The willingness of aging audiences to turn out for older artists, in concerts and at record stores, gives the lie to the wisdom that youth must always be served.

But older artists can have young fans, too; witness the seemingly eternal popularity of the Beatles. And youth artists can age into lifelong artistic maturity, singing very differently from their youth-idol days; witness Sinatra.

"License to Chill" represents no such maturation. It is a pleasant Buffett CD, ideal for summertime listening, the novelty being an overt attestation to his kind of Floridian folk-rock with country music, including duets with several country singers. Both musically and tactically, this makes a lot of sense, since country music has long proved resistant to youth fads and has honored its mature performers.

There is an entire tradition of American popular music, stretching back to the dawn of the recorded era more than a century ago and before that, as transmitted by oral tradition, that has nothing to do with youth. If you wish, this is "folk" music, meaning music for the folk, although modern electrified pop is just as much for the folk as the Carter Family ever was.

Folk music progresses, or evolves, in incremental jumps, punctuated by major leaps, as in the advent of someone like Bob Dylan (not that anyone is quite like Bob Dylan). An old song, dating back to the mists of anonymity, is picked up by someone new and given new verses and melodic twists and a new infusion of personality. It becomes part of a quilt, stretched over time.

The problem today, one that Mr. Buffett has not quite escaped, is the numbing demand of mass audiences to hear the songs they love sung just the way they're used to hearing them. How Mr. Taylor manages to invest his umpteen-millionth rendition of "Sweet Baby James" with the same innocence and earnestness and lingering sadness, time and time again, is a mystery to me.

Mr. Dylan, as he's been all his long life, is an exception. By refusing to sing his oldies the old way, by torturing them into new shapes and sounds, he keeps himself fresh even if he alienates some nostalgist fans. He's still a quintessential touring pro, although his incessant performing sometimes looks more like a hamster in a wheel than a singer who just loves to tour.

Mr. Buffett travels a lower road but a still honorable one. He sticks to his comfortable, laid-back image and style, a sleepy Dean Martin for a new generation. But he makes good, listenable music, and he makes it for everyone, young and old. So more power to him, now and for decades to come. If Billboard gives him something for having made it to No. 1, I hope it takes pride of place on his mantelpiece. If they have mantelpieces down in Margaritaville.