Daily Mail 21.1.16
Nothing freezes time as well as music. It carries us back. Hearing just a few lines of Hotel California on the radio and TV news yesterday took millions of us to a place in our minds where we were younger, the world more romantic and the future an exciting mystery still to be discovered.
Waking up to learn that Glenn Frey, who, as the founder of the Eagles, co-wrote and played on it, had died, there was, for the second time in a week, much lamentation among rock music fans.
Obviously, however, not everyone felt that way. Because, with the aftershocks of David Bowie’s unexpected death nine days ago still reverberating, a lot of people have understandably been questioning whether rock stars merit such attention.
My answer to them is that if your age puts you outside the demographic group who were in their teens or twenties in the Seventies when Bowie came along, it probably doesn’t. But if you are of that age group, and you were aware of popular culture, and most young people are, no matter how grand or mighty you might since have become, a part of you will always be that young person.
Both David Cameron and Tony Blair saw fit to reflect on Bowie, and I’m not quite cynical enough to think they were both just sailing with the wind. Others might disagree, but, just looking around, it’s impossible not to sense the genuine sense of loss of many Bowie fans on hearing of his death.
They felt that they’d lost a friend, although it was, of course, a completely one-sided friendship, in that they hadn’t actually known him other than through his music. The reality was that they’d projected on to Bowie something of themselves.
As adolescents we all like to have a hero with whom to identify, usually someone just a few years older, someone more outlandish and roguish than we are, or will ever be, someone who looks bigger and more colourful on the TV screen. In years gone-by it might have been a soldier in a smart uniform. Perhaps it was once a film star, like Rudolf Valentino or James Dean, who died aged 24, just as rock music was about to start.
But more recently it’s been a pop star – the guy with the magic wand of a microphone and song get into our minds. And, once there, those songs stay, as having passed through teenage stage, we grow up and get on with our lives.
Then, years later, we smile inwardly, when, as though running into an old school companion, a favourite record by our hero crops up without warning in a supermarket, or a busker attempts one of his or her songs in the town square. And the memories of the springtime of our lives come flooding back.
So, yes, the sense of loss is genuine and understandable every time a very famous musician or singer dies, be it Elvis Presley or John Lennon, Freddie Mercury or Amy Winehouse, because we are being reminded of our own youth that is now gone forever. With the death of a star we, too, lose something.
I can just remember talking to my grandmother about Gracie Fields. She had never actually seen Gracie, only heard her on the radio, but Gracie’s voice and verve would have been her companion during her very hard life of marriage to a usually absentee, itinerant musician. When she remembered Gracie Fields’ heyday, she was remembering, I like to think, the few sunny days she had in her own difficult life.
There are many reasons to grieve the loss of a hero, but they are almost always about us, more than our hero. I remember when Elvis Presley died. It was 1977 and I was with my then young children in Corsica, and, having been out of touch, as you always were when on holiday then, it was only when I saw a headline in a German newspaper that I realised a part of my life lay behind me. Somehow, though, I wasn’t upset.
A fan for over twenty years, and having become increasingly disillusioned as I’d watched from afar as drugs destroyed Elvis’s gifts, I realised at that moment that at least he wouldn’t disappoint me anymore, as he must have been disappointing himself.
From then on, in my mind, he stopped being middle-aged, overweight and sad. I think of him now at 21, as he was when I first encountered him, bursting with vigour at the sheer fun of being young and alive, as, unknowingly, he set about reshaping my life.
Other fans, after the first burst of morbid hysteria, have decided to behave almost as if Elvis didn’t die at all, keeping alive his presence in their lives as they flock to Graceland to see his home which is now an Elvis museum, by going to see his look-alikes who are almost always fat and forty, or by buying remixed versions of his records – the latest having him singing through the magic of digital, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Only David Bowie’s new album is selling more copies than Elvis’s latest this week!
My grief was different again when, three and a half years after Elvis died I got call from the Daily Mail at four-thirty one December morning telling me that John Lennon, whom I was due to fly to New York to see that day, had been shot.
Apart from the fact that I knew him as a friend, there was also the professional feeling of loss. He’d just started writing and recording again after years as a recluse, and we would now never know what he might have produced.
To the millions round the world who had seen their hero cut down, part of the effect was to canonise him as some saintly character, which he never was, nor would have wanted to be. But it was the way of coping that was chosen by many fans.
To be honest, musically the death of Glen Frey gave me more pause for thought than when I heard about that of Bowie, probably because I’m more of a traditionalist and have a particularly soft spot for American close harmony guitar bands. But I didn’t feel his dying as a personal loss, nor, I would imagine did many readers who may not even recognise his name.
For those who don’t, he was a versatile musician from Detroit who met Texan Don Henley in Los Angeles where they formed the Eagles in 1972, a band that then went on to sell 150 million albums while enjoying the rock and roll lifestyle of drugs, drink and girls to its fullest. I’m sure you get the picture.
The rows within the band were legendary and sometimes carried on even on stage, meaning that they broke up once for fourteen years. But when they got back together in 1994 they sounded as sweet as ever. My biggest sadness now is that there will be no more albums, or wonderful songs from Frey, nothing for me to look forward to from him anymore.
So, no, he wasn’t an imaginary friend for me, as Bowie was for his fans. And I doubt if I would have recognised him had I bumped into him in the street. It was the songs he wrote and sang that were the friends. Hotel California, the song he co-wrote with Don Henley, the the one I never got tired of bumping into. Then there were all the other hits, Peaceful Easy Feeling, Lyin’ Eyes, Take It To The Limit and The Best Of My Love. A long list.
The last couple of weeks have been a time for reflection in rock music as one by one the superstars find their way from the record charts into the obituary columns. But for as long as their music is played their one way friendships will never be quite dead – until, that is, the very last fan is dead, too.
