Rock ‘n’ Roll Retirees Need Help ‘n’ Hand

Of all the handouts that have recently crossed my desk, promoting some charity or commercial venture, certainly the most improbable was one I received the other day in behalf of a retirement home for rock ‘n’ rollers.

Surely, I thought, this is a joke. I read it through, looking for the tip-off.

It turned out to be dead serious. It came on a letterhead saying “For the Love of Rock and Roll,” with an address in Seminole, Fla. At the outset, in capital letters, it said: “The Starlite Starbrite Foundation, Inc., raises $20,000 for rock-n-roll retirement home!”

The text disclosed that Wolfman Jack, “the legendary DJ personality,” had emceed a concert with co-host Joey Dee on Feb. 14 at the Holiday Inn Surfside, in Clearwater Beach, Fla., raising $20,000 to be used by the foundation for construction of a retirement home in the Clearwater area for rock ‘n’ roll performers, “regardless of their ability to pay.”

It is not easy to accept the idea of rock ‘n’ rollers as elderly and poor. The image I have of rock ‘n’ rollers is of brash youngsters tooling about in Rolls-Royces and stomping about athletically on stage. They all seem to be sinfully rich and eternally youthful. One can hardly imagine Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan or Paul McCartney being broke and homeless.

Of course I know that not every rock ‘n’ roll group makes it big. For every Springsteen there are a thousand starving nobodies playing whistle stops. Even so, it is hard to think of them growing old and ending up in retirement homes.

“Many artists from the ‘50s and ‘60s are not very solvent today,” the handout says. “These are the performers who laid the groundwork for today’s musicians, and created the songs we now regard as standards. Yet, they have little or nothing to show for their efforts because they were not the best money managers. Some signed away their rights to royalties and others were victims of ‘creative bookkeeping.’ Many are in need as they approach their retirement age.”

A television movie of several years ago was set in the year 2027, or something close to that, and there was a scene in which it showed a rock ‘n’ roll group performing for aged survivors of the rock ‘n’ roll age. Performers and audience alike were grotesquely old, with palsied hands, bent backs, and wispy white hair. It was shocking to realize then that, inevitably, all rock ‘n’ rollers would come to that.

I remember, back in the early 1960s, when the slogan of the younger generation was “Don’t trust anybody over 30.” Obviously it was a slogan that inevitably must self-destruct. Being under 30 is an acutely ephemeral condition.

Like the surviving Beatles themselves, all the under-30s of the 1960s are either in their 40s or their 50s by now--undeniably middle-aged, and I wonder who they have left to trust. Since they are at least partly responsible for the mess the world is in, they must be experiencing some disillusionment.

There is nothing sadder than a middle-aged hippie. Somehow today’s yuppies seem more amenable to aging. In their Wall Street business suits they will adapt like chameleons to their middle years, unless the credit card castles they live in suddenly collapse.

One thinks of retirement homes for hippies as being quite understandable. After all, they flocked together in communes, so they should find institutionalized life bearable, although it may not be enlivened by spontaneous sex.

But a retirement home for rock ‘n’ rollers seems almost too paradoxical to exist. If the residents are all retired performers, will they be able to put their egos aside? Will they come equipped with their amplifiers, and stage in-house shows for each other’s entertainment? The handout says that the retirement home will include a theater named for Jackie Wilson, whose life inspired the home. “When he died in 1984,” the handout tells us, “he was penniless.”

One shudders at the thought of the din that will arise from these shelters, once they are full of retired rock ‘n’ rollers. I doubt that true rock ‘n’ rollers could ever give up their music, since it is the core and essence of their lives.

But they will share one blessing. By the time they reach retirement age they will be immune to their own noise. They will all be deaf.