No More Raindrops On The Dead

You know the way they say there’s nothing like kids to age you?

No, not wear you out and put years on you age you …

More the way you look at the neighbour’s lad — the one you remember as a floppy haired little guy in baggy shorts … seems like just the other day he was stomping all over your lilies in the side garden outside your back wall to get at the crab apple tree you foolishly grew there … and it hits you he’s six feet tall now, with Shaggy fluff on his chin, and he grunts hello like Lee Marvin (check out Wandrin’ Star, children … showing my vintage anyway with that reference!) …

Well I’ve been thinking how some of my generation’s rock stars and celebs have been ageing me …

They’re either dead or dying nowadays, or showing up at awards shindigs being linked onstage, and leaning on walking sticks, like Joni Mitchell, or going the full wheelchair thing on Oscars night, like Liza Minnelli, and her celebrity pusher, Lady Gaga …

Ireland’s own Jessie Buckley is wowing them as Sally Bowles in a stage revival of Cabaret in London’s West End … but I’m old enough to remember Liza’s electrifying turn as Bowles in the movie version …

Now maybe Mz L became synonymous with kohl-eyed show-must-go-on-no-matter-how-many-husbands-I’ve-been-through-or-how-crazy-they-were showbizzz excess, but she was talented, just like poor old mom Judy Garland, who went from Somewhere Over the Rainbow bright-eyed ingenue to found by her fifth husband dead at 47 … after a messy life-time of illness, breakdowns, doomed love affairs, spectacular falls and even more spectacular comebacks … 

Just seeing Joni recently, looking all stately and dignified and all that, but old … how easily I still see the floaty hippy with flowers in her billowing hair and a barb in her bouquet as she took down Bob Dylan as a plagiarist and a fake … check it out, it certainly makes a change from those Dylan bores who think he farts eau de cologne and poetry …

Again, our own Liam Clancy was on to young Robert Zimmerman, dismissing him as an annoying little so and so who followed the Clancy Brothers all around the Greenwich Village coffee house scene in the early Sixties … and reworked some of their old Irish ballads as hip anti-war songs …

Alas poor Joni … bows and flows of talent and big-toothed smiles and beautiful paintings and maverick artistic integrity … and the camera pans out into the audience and you see old Graham Nash … and you draw back the years and summon up the soft-voiced troubadour of Crosby, Still, Nash (and sometimes Young), and how Joni wrote an entire ground-breaking album, Blue, about the break-up of this star-kissed Sixties shacked-up pairing …

Are there any of the Monkees still alive? I think only Micky Dolenz … 

Even doe-eyed Paul McCartney’s recently been looking his age, though Ringo still dyes the hair and beard, and in his 80s is still giving us his ‘Peace, and love’, Liverpool-meets-LA New Age vibe, man! … 

Starman David Bowie’s gone out, Lennie Cohen has danced to the end of love, after saying so long one last time to Marianne Ihlen … Johnny has cashed in his chips … Barry is the last of the Gibbs … Charlie Watts tapped out recently enough, and we’re wondering how many lives has Keef Richards left …

Sure we haven’t even mentioned the departed film stars who marked my youth and middle age, everyone from one of my all-time favourites, Paul Newman, to Raul Julia and William Hurt, and Michael K Williams who played the wonderful Omar in The Wire, which I’m rewatching, and whoever you choose to mention or recall, and you think of that obituary thing they do with the schmaltzy music at the Oscars, and you watch with a mix of misty-eyed affection and head-scratching I-didn’t-know-he-was-still alive surprise …

I remember our door departed minder Breda used to say for the laugh: “Sure, there’s people dying now who’ve never died before”.

True. Some you struggle to remember, but some you’ll never forget …