The American band is still grand, but like me and the rest of us boomers, aging into grandpa-hood. I was flying this week from Atlanta to Little Rock and had the privilege to sit among some of the members of Grand Funk Railroad. My row mate, Dave Johnson, Stage Manager for the band, was a classic grandpa roady in his top shelf Harley shirt and neatly trimmed pure white goatee. A few rows up front the drummer and founding member Don Brewer read his paper through some fashionable bifocals. These guys were bad-ass.
I am not saying that in the past tense, I mean they are amazing now. According to Dave, they do fifty shows a year although they are in their late sixties and early seventies. They have successful marriages, great families and a grip of grandchildren. So put all of that together with culturally fundamental rock and roll, and you have some bad-ass rockers.
Imagine being able to follow your passion and express your art in such a way as to be a creative or motive force in an entire generation. I believe this is a goal of many if not all artists. I know it is mine.
So back to the trip. As we all boarded, Don Brewer took his seat in the first row, of first class, and after a few passengers, a tall, striking young blonde slid into the seat next to him. The contextual irony was not lost on me. Don is a good looking, fit grandpa with a full head of wavy silver hair to his shoulders, but the young girl barely noticed his existence. Take this scene back forty years and she would have been passed out at his feet after screaming like she had been shot to the heart.
As a boomer it is sometimes hard to feel relevant in these fast moving times. This scene did not help that, but it did help in other ways. When I called my wife from the airport in Little Rock, she immediately went to our collection of vinyl looking for our Grand Funk record albums. We laughed and expressed how cool the whole event was and signed off with expressions of love and missing each other.
In the car I realized that all boomers had formed a bedrock culture of music, conviction, civil unrest, art and innovation that is critically fundamental to the world we live in today. Rock and Roll of the sixties and seventies energized, inspired and expressed us in ways too numerous and complex to measure, but are evident in every millenial’s or gen x’er’s daily life. It is too bad if they fail to recognize it when it is sitting right next to them. I didn’t, and I am grateful for it. Thank you Dave Johnson for your time, and for reminding me just how cool my own generation was and is.
Check out number 10 on the music player and you will see what I mean. Rock on.
words & worlds 