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Few punk fans still look like this in their 60s. But some are still rebelling in other ways, says a new book.
You’re about to head out on a highway, looking to have a quiet beer or two at a county fair while listening to your favorite Steppenwolf cover band. And you decide to take along the Harley you first fell off in 1972.
But here’s the hitch: If you transport your hog on a flatbed trailer drawn by a Winnebago, and don your dry-cleaned denims only when you arrive, you’re definitely no longer born to be wild.
The time comes in virtually all rockers’ lives.
It was a night out in the Kent countryside, in his native England, that set Andy Bennett thinking about the tension of being too old to rock ‘n’ roll yet too young to die. A decade ago, he went to a punk gig, a generation after Johnny Rotten had delivered his bluntest get-stuffeds. Bennett, finding himself 20-plus years older than virtually every other member of the audience, gratefully joined five “old punk guys” he spotted huddling in a corner.
Speaking by phone from Griffith University, in Queensland, Australia, Bennett says, “We talked all night about their lives in punk, and how they’d come to be as old as they were”; he hints at the men’s ruefulness but also notes their pride as elders.
From that encounter evolved Music, Style, and Aging: Growing Old Disgracefully, just out from Temple University Press. In it, Bennett, a professor of cultural sociology and director of the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research (on Australia’s Gold Coast, a go-to spot for setting into one’s twilight), lays out his findings from 10 years of detailed interviews of aging scenesters. Not musicians; fans.
He wanted to know how the vibes of aging fans’ first musical loves—Jefferson Airplane, the Clash, AC/DC, X—still resonated in their lives: the paths their careers had taken, their cultural tastes, their views on politics, the environment, tolerance, personal fulfillment.
Social-science research on music and “biographical trajectories,” he says, remains in its infancy—sadly so, at a time when welfare services for the aging increasingly acknowledge individuals’ varied cultural and leisure inclinations. Why, he asks, give short shrift to the distinctive force that “music that matters” has had since the 1960s in its devotees’ lives? Today almost every Westerner has grown up during “an era of burgeoning consumerism and mediatization in which connections between music and identity found a new level of immediacy,” he writes.
Yes, Bennett name-checks a battery of sociological terms and concepts, but he is more blunt punk than rococo prog-rocker, so he also renders them into plain speaking. He did that in several earlier ethnographic books of youth culture, too, among them Cultures of Popular Music, Remembering Woodstock, and After Subculture.
The scholar grew up as a late baby boomer aware of the Beatles during their death throes, and of Hendrix, RIP 1970; but he most directly experienced glam rock, punk, and then acid house and other cranked-up dance-music forms. By the time those drove clubgoers into whirling frenzies, Bennett had gone from realizing that three chords did a rock band make to playing many varieties of popular music. He found pop rock and pub rock to be especially ready money-spinners for the budget-bothered student.
He eventually worked as a studio musician in England, and taught music for some of the 80s in Germany. “I was as involved as one could be at that age, short of making a living from music,” he says. But it was working with teenagers, and learning what dance and rap music meant to them, that “gave me a reason to go back to higher education for a Ph.D.”
For Music, Style, and Aging, he conducted interviews in Britain, France, and Australia—places where he held academic positions. Because he wanted to learn his subjects’ reads on their own lives, he pursued an ethnography of self-described former fanatics, still fans, rather than attempt some sort of statistical survey. He located riders on the storms of psychedelic rock, electric blues, punk, and other forms that affronted the musical and cultural norms of their days.
His research subjects included an activist writer, a painter-decorator, and a barman who quit because he couldn’t hack the music where he worked. He met aging punks who spoke of do-it-yourself careers that echoed the punk ethos and allowed them to recognize one another via “just something there that says ‘punk,’ y’know?”
Bennett came to appreciate the hairstyle of one fifty-something veteran of punk as a subtle development from the red-tipped spiky do of the 1970s ur-punk. What else could a balding head with “a slightly longer strip of hair in the shape of the classic punk Mohican style” be? But for many, a less spectacular coiffure had nonetheless become something that many a former punk considered postpunk, while leading a life in which overt rebellion and alienation had given way to subtler, inner echoes of the old never-mind-the-bollocks ethos.
Bennett argues that something other than capitulation can lead punk-fan forefathers to lose the Mohawks; plastic-shopping-bag clothing; and lips, cheeks, and eyebrows that look fresh from a face-planting in father’s tackle box. Rather, he says, “having had a chance to grow up and deconstruct anarchy, they realize it’s full of flaws,” so instead fold punk’s ethos into a more measured but still antiestablishment life.
A mid-50s man told Bennett that hippie aesthetics had informed his work as an interior designer. Not just what he created but what he wore: never a suit and tie, but no longer hippie attire, either—the Jesus locks, Haight-Ashbury jackets, and tie-dyed T-shirts.
One French hippie-of-old, who in his 20s had dressed like a Baader-Meinhof “urban guerrilla,” still favored the German militants’ “ugly” fashion aesthetic.
On Australian beaches, Bennett found that the VW camper van of hippiedom had morphed into “surfie” culture’s wheels of choice. With sandy boards on top, it got them nicely from epic waves to remnants of hippie ways: patchouli-scented alternative health clinics, cafes, seasonal festivals.
A solid majority of aging fans were male. The easy riff on that is that women, but rarely men, mature rather than remain fixed in their teens. Bennett believes that the way many men fold youthful musical passions into their lives counters that view.
In any case, he also notes, not only men still wax lyrical over the “liminal spaces” that rock festivals were, back in the day. At least, both men and women can, unless they recall those overcrowded gatherings as poorly organized mires of mud, overdoses, chain-link fences, and security guards with dogs.
What about the adult who, rather than remember clearly, retreats to his basement whenever confronted by adversity, to listen to his worn Rush or Grateful Dead platters?
Yes, Bennett agrees, some fans never progress beyond the teen selves that pop music created.
And what about nostalgia-drenched performances by simulacra of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Fleetwood Mac?
Sure, Bennett allows, sentimental wistfulness may stalk the aisles of $150-ticket comeback shows; but in the case of most of his informants, “they’re not necessarily nostalgic about their youths.” Rather, they appreciate the music scenes that begot them as “an important part of their biographies.
