May 21, 2004

By NICK HORNBY
LONDON

It's just before Christmas last year, and the Philadelphia rock 'n' roll band Marah is halfway through a typicallyferocious, chaotic and inspirational set when the doors tothe right of the stage burst open and a young man staggers in, carrying most of a drum kit. My friends and I have thebest seats in the house, a couple of feet away from Marah'sfrontmen, Serge and Dave Bielanko, but when the drummer arrives we have to move our table back to make room forhim. He's not Marah's drummer (the band is temporarilywithout) but he's a drummer, and he owns most of a drum kit, and his appearance allows the band to make an evenmore glorious and urgent racket than they had managedhitherto. The show ends triumphantly, as Marah shows tend to do, with Serge lying on the floor amid the feet of his public, wailing away on his harmonica.

This gig happens to be taking place in a pub called the Fiddler's Elbow, in Kentish Town, north London, butdoubtless scenes like it are being played out throughoutthe world: a bar band, a pickup drummer from an earlier gig, probably even the table-shifting. It's just that threeor four months earlier, Bruce Springsteen, a fan of theband, invited the Bielanko brothers to share the stage withhim at Giants Stadium for an encore, and Marah will shortly release what would, in a world with ears, be one of 2004'smost-loved straight-ahead rock albums, "20,000 StreetsUnder the Sky." These guys shouldn't be playing in the Fiddler's Elbow with a pickup drummer. And they shouldn'tbe passing a hat around at the end of the gig, surely? Howmany people have passed around the hat in the same year that they appeared at Giants Stadium?

Thirty years ago, almost to the day, Jon Landau published his influential, exciting, career-changing, andsubsequently much derided and parodied article about BruceSpringsteen in The Real Paper, an alternative weekly - the article that included the line "I saw rock 'n' roll futureand its name is Bruce Springsteen." I had never read therest of it until recently, and it remains a lovely piece of writing. It begins, heartbreakingly: "It's four in themorning and raining. I'm 27 today, feeling old, listeningto my records and remembering that things were different a decade ago." I'm only guessing here, but I can imagine are a number of you reading this who can rememberwhat it was like to feel old at 27, and how it bears no resemblance to feeling old at 37, or 47. And you probablymiss records almost as much as you miss being 27.

It's hard not to think about one's age and how it relates to rock music. I just turned 47, and with each passing yearit becomes harder not to wonder whether I should belistening to something that is still thought of as more age appropriate - jazz, folk, classical, opera, funeralmarches, the usual suspects. You've heard the arguments amillion times: most rock music is made by the young, for the young, about being young, and if you're not young andyou still listen to it, then you should be ashamed ofyourself. And finally I've worked out my response to all that: I mostly agree with the description, even though it's crude, and makes no effort to address the recent, mainly excellent work of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Mr.
Springsteen et al. The conclusion, however, makes no sense to me any more.