First, off thank you, God for another day above ground, and the opportunity to live well and RIGHT !!!
As I get older and all the fake, phony, B.S. this world peddles is slowly stripped away to expose what’s real and what’s propaganda. I realize how willing I’ve always been to sacrifice what I knew to be best for my own well being, in favor of feeling wanted and that I belonged, and was connected to the hearts and minds of the other human beings around me. Somehow music allowed me to transform that notion into something noble in my outlook, or so I thought. Closer to fact, I was selling myself, my own custom designed reality, to escape reality…..yeah soak that in for a minute.
I didn’t want to face that people are HUMAN, AND THEREFORE very very fallible. That people and life can be and will be hard at times. You’re gonna get HURT, the love of your life may reject you, you may lose what you hold most precious, you may be alone and lonely for years on end. That’s reality, so like many many others from our most unique place in time, I whole heartedly bought into the “my life will be great when I”…….. scam, that’s sold to each and every one of us in some form or another. You know the one, “my life will be great when I” “get that car I’ve been saving for”, or “when this girl I’m crazy about says yes she’ll go out with me” or “if I get this promotion and the pay raise, life’s gonna be sweet” or in my case “when I make it big in music, I’ll be happy and have the life I’ve always wanted and the girl of my dreams will reassure me around the clock of how much she and all who know me love me” ……(yeah I know mine was very kind to my ego)
Enter Gerry Rafferty, I didn’t in all honesty “discover” music treasures like Mr. Rafferty until much past my teens and the former’s musical peak and prime. What I’m trying so clumsily to say is, there was a point not too far in my past when I realized that “Grown Up Rock” or “AOR” and artists like Gerry Rafferty, Don Henley, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh, and several other greats, were “Real World” in comparison of all the adolescent party rock and metal of my teens and into my early thirties, before I truly started centering myself on blues and roots and Americana, there was the day it entered my orbit alerting me of it’s existence, then there was the day a decade or so later, when I finally GOT IT !!! What “Grown Up Rock” is all about, is what it ISN’T ABOUT, it’s no longer about being a heart throb, a prima donna, an ageless young lion, a newcomer with 30 years ahead of them to build a solid career and fanbase, or being what the kids are dancing to, those are all things left in the hands of the youths.
“Grown Up Rock” is about life, living it, and leaving it when we die, and as a genre well in its 70’s rocks’ older artists have carved out a wonderful creative headspace for those who follow to continue to have a relevant and appreciative listener/artist community as both have decidedly marked their aging gracefully with a measure of rock n roll coolness, they’ll take to their graves. Mick Jagger is 80, Robert Plant with Alison Krauss’ harmonies is one of my newest favorite country performers, etc etc. But Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, that’s the one that showed me, Rock, Rock N Roll, and Old Rockers, can and have matured into serious musical art forms and artists, just as legitimate as cool uptown jazz, and the delta slide guitar of an aging bluesman, Rock it’s for all ages and lets walk down “Baker Street” with Gerry…….