The news that Ian Hunter just turned 84 reminded me of one of my fave facty surprises when doing S+A, which is learning that when the Mottman became a pop star he was already in his early thirties, with a wife and two kids.
Ian Hunter, in fact, was born so long ago that he's older than my mother.
More relevantly, he's older than both Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger, the two primary sources for Hunter and the Hoople's style. (That seems a bit undignified somehow - like a prefect copying a fourth former).
"All the Young Dudes", the song that he and they are most remembered for, was received at the time as the Third Generation Anthem. The "third generation" was a concept coined by Alice Cooper, or at least most prominently promoted by him in interviews. The idea was that the First Generation was the kids whose lives were shaken by rock 'n' roll when it first erupted in the late 1950s; the Second Generation was the Beatles and the Stones cohort; but now here we were, in 1971-72, with a whole fresh wave of youngsters who wanted their own bands to follow, their own idols, their own sound. Hence the lyric, written by David Bowie of course, with its jeering reference to older siblings still stuck on stale Sixties sounds and ideals: "And my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones / We never got it off on that revolution stuff".
The irony of Ian Hunter, born in June 1939, before the Second World War, singing these lines should be fairly obvious. He would have been just the right age, at 17, 18, to have been one of the First Generation Brit rock'n'roll singers alongside Cliff Richard and Billy Fury (both slightly his juniors). When the beat group boom kicked off in England around 1964, Hunter would have been on the older side already but could have joined in the Second Generation action. To be the mouthpiece of Third Generation consciousness at the ripe age of 33 is pushing it.
Mind you, one of the peculiar things about glam 'n' glitter is that while it was the teenage sensation of the nation, rather a lot of its prime movers were old lags who'd been trying to have a hit for ages. Gary Glitter had been a touted potential teenybop idol before The Beatles; Alvin Stardust, likewise, had been the roadie of Brit rock'n'rollers Shane Fenton and the Fentones and then was drafted as replacement for the suddenly-dead singer, even taking on the name Shane Fenton. Alice Cooper was no spring chicken (23 when he sang "I'm Eighteen", but still he was a good nine years younger than Ian Hunter). Even the relatively youthful Bowie and Bolan had been trying for ages to make it, donning and doffing styles and personae since the early-mid Sixties.
But out of that whole era of theatrical rockers, I think only Alex Harvey (born 1935) was more ancient than Ian H.
Incidentally, the First / Second / Third Generation concept that Cooper was pushing is out-of-whack with the commonly regarded "natural span" of a generation (20 to 30 years). If we give the idea credence, that would mean rock would be running through three whole "generations" in less than 20 years (1955 to 1972). These would seem to be more accurately termed micro-generations, not tied to the interval between childhood and having children yourself but more like the sensibility-gulf between wide-gap siblings. So the lyric about the brother still listening to the Beatles and Stones fits.
(Look out soon - possibly this very week - for my essay that explores the concept of "the generation", along with related notions like the decade etc.)
Alice Cooper's own Third Generation anthem, if we don't count "I'm Eighteen", was "Generation Landslide"
I guess you could draw a parallel with the multiplicity of artistic movements that sprang during the modernist period: expressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, Dada, constructivism, De Stijl and surrealism all formed within the same 20-25 years. Several of those, futurism and Dada especially, considered themselves parricidal, when "fraticidal" may be a more fitting term.
ReplyDeleteNot too long ago, you asserted that the hippy movement and the punk movement were two crests of the same general wave. So would you dismiss even these micro-generations as just in-crowd squabbling?
That's a good analogy with the early 20th Century - isms, although only some of them would be successively reactive I should think - more like concurrently at war with each other (so yeah, fratricidal)
ReplyDeleteI think of hippie and punk as two phases of the same larger formation (the Rock Generation) - antagonistic phases but despite that they share some bedrock assumptions about the importance of the music and a kind of power that youth could possess if it got its shit together.
The concept of the micro-generation would really fit in this case, because if you look at the conventional notion of the generation most hippies and most punks belong to the baby boom - so literally the same generation.
(Some of the older Sixties-type cats are technically part of whatever the generation is before baby-boomers - I'm not sure it has a name).
(And some very young punks would count as Generation X - but they'd have to be younger than me. I was 14 in June 1977 and I was at the very tail-end of the baby-boom. Yes I was surprised to discover that, always assumed I was pure Gen X - whatever these things mean (which is what the piece I've written is all about - worrying away at these concepts and their alleged purchase on reality).
The cohort before the Boomers are often known as the Silent Generation, apparently based on a Time magazine coinage from 1951.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the rock fans of the 60s may have been Boomers, all the key performers were of that older generation. Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Hendrix, Lou Reed and Jim Morrison were all born during World War 2. I am sure that if you wanted you could use that fact to build a theory of infant absorption of societal trauma.
It's not until the 70s, and the Springsteen / Bowie / Patti Smith / Iggy Pop generation, that you really get a lot of Boomers emerging as rock stars.
A fact that may explain quite a lot about Pink Floyd is that Roger Waters was a war baby, born 1943. His career and life have been shaped by his father's death at Anzio the following year, when he was five months old. He has said his earliest memory is VJ-Day.
DeleteGilmour and Barrett, on the other hand, were Boomers, born 1946.
I wonder why they were dubbed the Silent Generation? It sort of implies that they did not have much impact on their time, just kept their heads down. Never found their voice, their representatives, artistically
DeleteThen there's that term the Greatest Generation for those who fought fascism in WW2 (I believe it's a retrospective invention of one or two prominent American journalists / news media hosts. It reflected their feeling that people today don't have the same mettle or spirit of self-sacrifice for a lofty cause. That we are decadents, self-absorbed, who never really grew up, became men like our grandfathers did).
Perhaps the Silent Generation was the Greatest Generation because they didn't make a fuss, they just quietly and uncomplainingly got on with the job of saving democracy.
There's a good Time article from 1970, written by someone called Gerald Clarke, looking back at his generation and comparing them to the young people of the time:
Delete"The term Silent Generation may have been unflattering, but it was not inaccurate. By the standards of today's aware youth, we were, with few exceptions, still, quiet and serenely uninvolved. Interested primarily in ourselves and our own destinies, we tended to be bored by politics and self-removed from social issues. In the '50s, America seemed both workable and working. It allowed us the luxury of growing up in peace and security: Unlike those who preceded or those who followed us, we were not expected to fight or die for our country. The grievances of poverty, race and inequality were no less valid than they are today, but we were largely unaware of them. And so, for most of us they did not exist. Hypocritical? Yes. Smug? That too —insufferably so. But then so was the country. If the decade of the '50s had the suffocating "smell of the middle class," as Gloria Steinem, 34, says with distaste, then it was an odor that most Americans seemed to like."
The whole piece is worth a read: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,878847,00.html
But the article largely misses the point, made by Menand in the New Yorker, that that generation included not only most of the innovators of the first and second waves of rock, but most of the leaders of the civil rights movement. They - or at least the brightest and best of them - turned out to be not really silent at all.
DeleteLouis Menand had a piece about the Silents/Boomers discrepancies in the New Yorker around the time of Woodstock's 50th: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-misconception-about-baby-boomers-and-the-sixties
ReplyDeleteGermane to the attempted overthrow in All The Young Dudes, the relationship between culturally current musician and fan is that of an older sibling and younger sibling - by the time you've made it, you're generally not in the target audience of pop anymore, so (in theory and ideal anyway) you're more of a well-meant guide or steward than an active participant, a graduate instead of a student. How well that plays out varies, of course.
That throws even more sceptical cold water on the idea of generations, then - if the Voices of A Generation are actually artists etc who are from the previous generation, demographically speaking.
DeleteThinking about it, I reckon the prominent figure who set out on a career in music latest in life is Leonard Cohen (1934-2016), whose first album is from 1967, following an established line as a poet and novelist. But I don't believe it makes sense to plonk him within the generational bandwidths under discussion.
ReplyDeleteI never never never never never want to hear any version of Hallelujah ever again. The best song called Hallelujah happens to be by a group called the Happy Mondays. You heard of them?
He was probably more of the Beat Generation, than the Rock Generation, Lenny Cohen. But I don't know much about him - he was a poet well before becoming a singer, right?
DeleteAgreed about that awful song...
Do you think with doing a song called 'Hallelujah', Happy Mondays had Can half in mind?
You're trying to separate the Beat Generation and the Rock Generation? The Beatniks happily got subsumed into the strata of rock. I'm no expert on Leonard Cohen, but he seems more to have adopted the singer-songwriter role rather than have it engraved in his bones (not a denigration at all: who would choose James Taylor over Leonard Cohen?). His Wikipedia page says his first collection of poetry was published in 1956.
DeleteCan were an avowed influence on the Mondays, as were Labelle and that Coke advert on a hill. Like their ultimate philosophical forebears the Sex Pistols, the Mondays grinned at the opportunity for theft (and the Can song is called Halleluhwah, so don't you try and get me to choose between Can and the Mondays as to which is the better Hallelujah song: I see through your game, matey).
Sure, some Beats became Hippies or hippie fellow travellers - e.g. Merry Prankster Neal Cassady. Allen Ginsberg being on a Clash record. But originally the Beat Generation's music was Jazz.
DeleteGenerations - if such things really exist - don't start and end punctually, with one phase disappearing off the scene and another arriving to take its place, and take up all the space, as it were. There's carry-on and bleed-through. Some congenital hip-for-life types keep moving with the times. There are original hippies who then got involved in punk / postpunk, and then again with rave. Well, the classic example would be Genesis P-Orridge. In between industrial and rave, he even got involved in '60s nostalgia with the "Godstar" tribute to Brian Jones and another Psychic TV release that was a cover of "Good Vibrations". They also did a song about Roman Polanski, although that's more to do with the Manson obsession.
Okay, I have the winner here - the Oldest Dude in Rock was (surely!) Ed Cassidy, the drummer in Spirit. Born in 1923. He was the guitarist Randy California's step-father.
ReplyDelete