teaching the next generation
Somehow in life you have to leave a legacy. There comes a time when you have to leave off doing things and pass them along to the next generation. I’ve just come in from cutting down a big broken branch on our large cherry tree. It involved climbing up to the top of the tree with a saw and cutting through the large split bough that was dangerously dangling. I couldn’t help but notice that at approaching the age of sixty five I was not quite as nimble as I had been as a young cub-scout. It did give me a brief moment of pleasure to find that I can get just as dirty with green lichen as ever. Liz will have a moan about me being in my best jumper and jeans. What the hell. Things don’t change.
Yet they do.
We get old and cease to function as well. The eyes go. The ears deteriorate and the words and memories do not flow as easily as they once did.
Soon I won’t be heading for the front.
Soon I won’t be heading anywhere at all.
My kids had it tough. They found it quite hard to rebel during those troublesome teenage years – though they all seemed to manage in their own sweet way. Whatever music they might want to get to like their old man had it in spades. My collection was extensive.
Hester responded by not really getting into music at all.
The two older boys got into Hip-Hop and break-dancing. It was all the trend when they were little. They carried a little square of rolled up lino around with them and practiced doing robot dancing, moon-walking, turtles and spinning on their head. I think they thought the back-streets of Hull were synonymous with the Bronx. They also figured that as I hated all the post-punk synthesiser crap it was good to get into the pretty-boy Pop of Duran Duran.
Dylan did go on to appreciate Harper and a range of decent music and Barnaby really got into the Madchester sound of Stone Roses, Ian Brown and then the grunge of Nirvana. Sadly I was sceptical of all of those but later began to really appreciate them. He didn’t have such bad taste after all.
Henry, probably because he was the youngest, was the one who appreciated my tastes the most. I took him to his first Roy Harper gig at the age of six and he has grown up with both Roy and Nick Harper. When he was in his late teens I started to try to give him a sound education.
I took him to the Love gigs which he thought were brilliant. He actually ended up going back to the hotel room with Arthur Lee and spending time with him. I took Henry to see the Magic Band and he pronounced that they were the best live band ever. He went to loads of their gigs and took all his friends along. After long years of driving them crazy in the car with endless tapes of Beefheart he had finally come to see the genius of it.
I then took him along to see some good old Rock ‘n’ Roll before all the old guys died off. We went to see Chuck and Jerry Lee in Bradford. They were both still great in their seventies. Chuck was still duck-walking and doing his stances. Jerry wasn’t quite so flamboyant. He no longer climbed on his piano or stood and shook his hair so violently but he did kick his piano stool away in one number and was still pounding those keys.
The strangest one of all was taking Henry to a Little Richard gig again in Bradford. It was a weird one. Little Richard looked as if he was showing his years. He shuffled more than rocked, but he still had the voice and did do some great Rock ‘n’ Roll. He was the master when he got going. The weird stuff was all the evangelical Christianity. I really don’t get this American fanaticism with Jesus. They must have cottoned on that there isn’t going to be any second coming – it was all just another Middle Eastern sect – one of many. Little Richard dispensed these books on Christianity to everyone. I think I threw mine away. The other strange aspect was all the very camp gay bit. Somehow it did not quite all gel together. What a strange mix that was – bawdy Rock – cloying Christianity – and camp gay posturing. We then went round the corner for the capitalist bit and paid a princely sum to get a poster signed. But hey – we got to see a legend!
