17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Hope I Get Old Before I Die' Review: The Music Never Stops
The saddest story in David Hepworth's superlative chronicle of the phenomenon known as 'heritage rock' takes in the later years of the Who's bass player, John Entwistle. The members of the Who had begun their careers in the molten heat of the early 1960s. Two decades later, as their LP releases and live appearances became sporadic, Entwistle retreated to his 55-room Cotswolds mansion. During the arid years that followed, as Mr. Hepworth records in 'Hope I Get Old Before I Die,' Entwistle idled away his time in 'a lampoon of rock star excess,' drinking, smoking and spending vast amounts of money on a fleet of cars and a 250-piece guitar collection. On the eve of the band's 2002 U.S. tour, the 57-year-old was found dead in a Las Vegas hotel room, in the company of a woman who recalled that his last acts before joining her in between the sheets were to fold his pants over a chair and remove his hearing aid.
Seventeen years before, the Who had already become a vintage act, one of many bands that had been going for a very long time and, in middle age, were nervous about what the future might hold. Mr. Hepworth's book helps explain how the music business came to unlock the enormous potential of legacy acts—and eventually to become dominated by them.
According to Mr. Hepworth, it was Live Aid, the globally televised concert fundraiser organized by Bob Geldof for African famine relief, that sent heritage rock into orbit. A cynic might think that the concert's real beneficiaries—alongside the millions of starving Africans—were bands such as Queen, which boiled its act down into a succinct set of well-choreographed crowd-pleasers, and solo performers such as Paul McCartney. Today, 40 years after a concert at which he was already being marketed as a gnarled veteran of an age gone by, Mr. McCartney is still playing to packed houses the world over and has some claim to be the most successful musician on the planet.
Rock 'n' roll used to be thought of as a young person's game. How is it then, that, with the exception of Taylor Swift's world-bestriding achievements, much of the serious money now gets made by the over-70s, and that many publications devoted to popular music have their faces on the cover?
