Still, if you want a really great show, and one that will fill a stadium, you need an act that has some mileage, like Sir Paul McCartney, who is playing soon at Citi Field here in New York in shows that sold out the stadium in less than five minutes. This is apropos since Paul, as a member of a little band called the Beatles, was part of the first concert ever held in a stadium. For those of you too young to know or remember, Paul and his mates played to a packed house at Shea Stadium back in 1965. Now the first concert ever at Citi Field will feature Sir Paul.
No matter how wonderful the Jonas Brothers or any of these other acts are today, I don’t think any single one of them could sell out a large stadium like that. If you want to do that, you need the old boys to have top billing: McCartney can still do it, Springsteen too, and maybe Bon Jovi or the Rolling Stones if they come around again.
So, as I sat there this weekend looking at my daughter’s posters on the wall, I thought about the posters on the wall of my sister’s and my room over 30 years ago. So much has changed since then, and now Farrah is not just one of Charlie’s Angels but something much more, and Michael is somewhere between here and Alpha Centauri, no doubt dazzling the heavens with his sparkling glove and socks, singing with that ethereal voice and dancing a moonwalk as a now eternal boy-man who is and ever will be a blazing comet across the sky.
In pace requiescat, Farrah and Michael.
Article comments
1 - Jon Sobel
Well said. I had that Farrah poster too... I agree that few if any of these new stars will stand the test of time - mass audiences such as existed in the 60s and 70s don't exist anymore. I wrote about it here.
2 - Joanne Huspek
What's even sadder is that music these days is less about art and more about business. I see the current crop as commodities, and perhaps it's the big stars like MJ who made that possible.
By the way, great old posters can be had at Amoeba Records. Looking at them makes me nostalgic about the good old days.
3 - Victor Lana
Thanks for the comments, Jon and Joanne.
I wish I still had those old posters. I still have the one of the Beatles, but that's all I have left.
4 - Ruvy
I'm older than the lot of you commenting here. I never had a poster of any kind on my wall. The closest I ever got to a poster was a huge map of Israel and the blue and white flag of this country on my apartment wall in the Bronx - in 1971.
My two sons had, between them, one single poster on the wall - one of Bruce Lee, a gift from a French immigrant in 2001 when we lived in a 3 room apartment in an absorption center in the Armon haNetziv neighborhood of Jerusalem. No posters grace their walls today.
My older son is bothered by music - he takes after his mother that way - who has to be in a mood to listen to her favorites. My younger son likes some of the hip-hop trash out there but for the most part, he likes the same kind of music I do. His MP4 player is loaded with Billy Joel, Dire Straits, Queen, the Eagles, with scattered songs from Kansas, and a number of tunes from Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Louie Armstrong....
It is really strange to say that. If I had liked the music of someone my sister's age (she's 21 years older than me), stuff like the Ink Spots, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, that is what I would have been like if I had my younger son's tastes. And I would have been viewed as weird by everyone around me.
We Baby Boomers have had a poisonous effect on America - forcing everyone to march to our tunes - and Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were part of this poisonous trend.
But they are dead. And soon, we Baby Boomers will be, too.
5 - Victor Lana
Hey, Ruvy, I always love your comments, but this one (especially the last sentence) really depressed me.
6 - Ruvy
Victor,
You think it depressed you? I put "we" in that sentence - I'm part of that "we" and have, more and more, the sense of how long I do NOT have to hang around. My father, z"l, died when he was 68 - for me that is one decade away.
We were discussing this subject this evening, my younger son and I. My conclusion was that by the time Billy Joel was pumping out hits, everything he was producing was based on stuff thirty years oldor older. He is the one who readily admits that there is nothing creative on the music scene. He tells me this. And he is exposed to more than I am - three different cultures at least, in Israel.
"It's such a drag gettin' old."
7 - Cindy
"What a drag it is gettin' old."
I don't know. I think I feel sort of fine with getting old. Sure I miss some good times and wish I had known then what I know now. But I just realized I am pretty comfortable with who I am at this moment. Hard to beat that--youth alone wouldn't be worth it.