talking about music and aging with mike doughty

a ten year old conversation resurfaces

photo from wfuv

[some background: i interviewed Mike Doughty (Soul Coughing and some very great solo albums) and wrote most of this for Forbes back in 2013. it’s something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately having turned 60 so i emailed Mike and asked if i could update and reprint it and he said sure]

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“I can’t believe you’re 50 and you still listen to Anthrax”

“I can’t believe Scott Ian is 50 and he’s still in Anthrax.”

My son said this to me ten years ago as he was getting ready to go see Anthrax after telling him I had just listened to Persistence of Time that morning. My answer shut him up, but opened up a whole new world of thoughts for me. Over the next few months I’d have an ongoing conversation with myself and anyone who would listen about the perception of age and how it relates to music, the culmination of which came when I read musician Mike Doughty’s now deleted tumblr post on the same subject: Forget piracy. The music industry’s biggest money-loser is an inability to connect with older people that used to spend money on music, and don’t anymore.

I read the piece — in which Doughty laments the way the music industry treats both fans and new musicians over 40 — with great interest. This was the very conversation I had been having with myself. The idea that the music industry doesn’t care about those over 40 goes hand in hand with the idea that younger people have a lot of misconceptions about what it’s like to be over 40.

Those of us in our 40s and 50s and 60s? We’re the generation that grew up on rock music. Our middle school and high school days were soundtracked by heavy metal, new wave and punk. We are, for lack of a better phrase, the Metallica generation, the kids who grew up head banging.

So what makes people think that the minute you turn 40 you have to hand in your “cool” card and all your metal records and start listening to nothing but old Springsteen records while sitting in your rocker after Matlock reruns? We are older. Not old. We’re still the people who scrawled pentagrams in the margins of our notebooks, who partied in arena parking lots before shows, who waited outside record stores on new release morning. Not only are we still those people but we still want to do those things. It just seems like no one wants us to.

Mike Doughty has a lot to say on the subject:

“To acknowledge that the audience is aging is to acknowledge that you’re also aging. A consequence of this is that it’s just about the only industry that lets 95% of its customer base disappear, once they turn 35, without utterly freaking out about the loss of revenue. My general reaction can be summed up as, ‘Seriously, nobody wants this money?’”

We, the north of 40 crowd, have the money. We’re mostly a financially stable lot, us older folk. We’ve got disposable income and a need to spend it. We want to go to shows. We want to keep up what we started when we were just teenagers buying counterfeit AC/DC t-shirts in the Nassau Coliseum parking lot.

Said Doughty:

“Successful artists - artists that managers, publishers, and recording companies would consider worthwhile to invest in - have live fanbases. The variables, in developing, and keeping, an audience that’s north of 40, really aren’t that complicated: make shows earlier, make them shorter, nix the opening act, tell people exactly what time the music starts, and ends, make dumb talky drunks shut up.”

But they don’t want to do that because they don’t believe people over 40 still want to rock. And maybe we don’t want to rock in quite the same way — I don’t know about you, but a bottle of Boones Farm wine and a nickel bag in the back seat of a dying Volkswagen while listening to a cassette of the band you’re seeing just isn’t in the cards for me anymore — but we still want the music. We want to see the bands. We want to buy their stuff. And it’s hard to do that when we’re dismissed. Even bands that were popular when we were kids are still putting on shows but they appeal to, well, the kids. They forget we are still out here, we still have all their albums on vinyl. But they are catering to their new, younger audience. The show starts at 9, give or take an hour, there’s three warm up bands and no seats.

It’s not like we’re so old we can’t do that. It’s that we don’t want to. We worked all day, we came home to our families and made dinner and cleaned up the house, maybe paid some bills and now we have to stand up until our favorite band comes on at 10pm and we’ve got to be up for work at 5.

We’re older and our needs and priorities have changed, but we have not. We still enjoy the music and the industry needs to recognize that and respond to it. They need to understand that we want to see our favorite bands live, we just need to do it in a different way than we did when we were 17. By ignoring the fact that the Metallica generation is out there, still wanting to spend money to go to shows and buy albums, they are cutting off a huge part of their fan base. Where did they think all those old fans went, anyhow? Do they really think we are sitting on our porches with our Werther’s candy telling kids to get off our lawns? No, we’re sitting in our living rooms listening to Kill ‘Em All, lamenting the fact that the younger generation seems to think we’re too old for this shit.

And maybe it’s our fault. As Doughty said:

“On a societal level, we people north of 40 often do a grave disservice to their youngers by hiding their age, being ashamed of it. I think it’s less about people being aware that one still loves Public Enemy, than going onto Facebook and not hiding your age on your profile.“

He has a point. Maybe we need to be a bit more vocal about who we are and how old we are, just to show the music industry and artists that we are out here. We’re 40. We’re 50. We’re 60. We’re the same ages as the artists in the bands that are playing gigs geared toward kids half our age.

To acknowledge that the audience is aging is to acknowledge that you’re also aging.

Maybe Doughty is on to something there.

Those who make the shows and promote the music we crave first need to acknowledge that Scott Ian is 60 years and still in Anthrax before they acknowledge that 60 years olds still want to see him play.

We’re not old. We’re older. And we know better than to think we’re just supposed to give up, turn in our records and fade to black.