Aging '60's Stars

A while back I was watching a VH1 retrospective on the sixties, and they were talking about all those great musicians who died as soon as the decade was over - Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin especially (Duane Allman seems to get no love).  They were interviewing David Crosby, and he was saying something to the effect of "...how well would Jimi be playing today?  What would Janis be singing today?  These were major talents."

I'm a baseball fan, and the sport is filled with guys everyone thought would be the next superstar, who nothing ever came of.  Sometimes one of these guys comes along, and then gets injured, and he only ever had two seasons - but they were phenomenal seasons.  You wonder (and argue about) would this guy have been a Hall-of-Famer given the chance?  One of the things you can do is to compare players who, say, got injured and ended prematurely a promising career, with a player who was approximately as talented, and see where their career went.

So I look at Janis Joplin.  Janis was granted one of the most beautiful raspy voices ever to sing the blues, and she was a firecracker on stage.  Her posthumously released album Pearl sold a zillion copies and is brilliant from start to finish.  It's easy to see a career filled with Pearls and think of the tragic loss.

Now look at Joe Cocker, say 1970.  He'd been a relative unknown until Woodstock, where he'd basically set the place on fire.  He had the temerity not just to cover the Beatles, but to utterly transform them.  Listen to his versions of "She Came In Through the Bathroom Window" or "With a Little Help from My Friends".  They're nearly unrecognizable.  Joe went on a huge tour called "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" the double live album of which might be the greatest live album ever.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume that Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin were in about the same place in 1970.  She was a little more famous, but I think it's safe to say the talent levels were about equivalent.  Let's say we can reasonable expect Janis's career to have followed a trajectory pretty close to Cocker's.  Where would she be now?

Probably, nowhere special.  The major work of Cocker's career was behind him by the mid-Seventies, and he's been riding his voice and former glory ever since.  For every halfway decent song he records nowadays, it's a reminder that he really doesn't have a "The Letter" left in him.  Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin were both singers, and neither of them was really a song writer - their careers were only as good as the songs they could get.  Even Elvis trailed off by the mid sixties.  So what does this say about someone who wrote the bulk of their material, whose talent was in elevating the guitar to point approaching Mjolnir?

So let's look at Hendrix.  He's often called the greatest guitarist ever now, and even before his death was basically thought of that way.  But in the sixties, the competition was stiffer.  Even if Hendrix was first among equals, those equals, everyone knew, included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and a guy thought every bit in the same league, Peter Green.

Eric Clapton's career nearly sputtered out in the mid seventies as well - in fact, heroin almost had him pulling a Hendrix back then, and we'd never have had such classics as..."Tears in Heaven"?  Let's face it, comeback or no, Clapton's career by the time he started putting out solo albums was clearly past his prime.  He would cut exactly one great album after that, Unplugged, and the highlight of that was a track from 1972.

Jeff Beck fared little better, and Peter Green burned out as hard as it's possible to burn out.  Today, his signature song ("Black Magic Woman") is mostly associated with another guitarist, and almost nobody knows that he was even in the band he founded: Fleetwood Mac.

The best case scenario it seems for me for Hendrix is something like Clapton's career - periodically interesting output, with more and more mediocre albums filling in the years.  He'd probably have had the occasional comeback tour, maybe be working on an album with Rick Rubin by now, and he'd still be a hell of a guitarist.  But he'd be nowhere near the cutting edge.  It would have passed him by sometime around 1978, and aside from a guest spot on a Radiohead album here or there, he'd be remember as a living artifact.

Sacrilegious enough?