One of the questions about rock music has always been what happens when the people who make it grow up?

For a proud 'hope I die before I grow old” genre that is so youth-oriented the question is only just being answered, and the early assumptions that if you're over thirty you're dead seems somewhat exaggerated.
The difference with this modern rock thing – and it is modern, only being around for some fifty years now – is that unlike most previous forms of music the performer is also the creator. That was unusual in mainstream white music. (Its more common in jazz and blues, though remember that even someone like Muddy Waters relied on Willie Dixon to write most of his signature tunes.)
With serendipitous timing the man who many think changed all that currently has a hit album in New Zealand. He was, of course, Buddy Holly. Before a fateful plane trip at age twenty three Buddy Holly was The Man. He wrote his songs, he arranged them, he produced them, her sang them and he played lead guitar. People didn't do that.
Buddy Holly was simply extraordinary. When he died he had been recording for only eighteen months yet the 'Best of…” collection now out has two CDs containing fifty songs in all, at least half of which are easily recognisable. What an output! No wonder that four young boys in England all wanted to be Buddy Holly and mimicked his band's name by calling themselves The Beatles.
And that's when the whole game changed and everyone had to write their own songs. (There are valiant exceptions, like Joe Cocker, but that was the new paradigm.)
And then, with Bob Dylan, the game changed again. Rock music could have lyrics that were serious, not just boy meets girl scenarios but songs about anything. People talked about lyrics being poetry (though they were usually just kind or deluded).
But it was still music made and marketed to the youth market.
Now, to everyone's surprise, it seems that you can grow old, make rock music, and not be just a nostalgia act. Not that there is anything wrong with nostalgia acts. There's always a market for nostalgia whether it comes in the form of The Who or Simon and Garfunkel. But others are still hoeing an original row despite being eligible for bus passes.
And that's where we get back to Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan, who is yet again on tour as I write and who has a new album coming out next week. If anyone was looking for an inspiration on the long hard road of rock ‘n' roll, look no further than Bob Dylan.
Consider this: Dylan is now about to turn 68. He has played an average of 100 shows every year since 1987. Each year he does three or four tours, going out for around two months at a time and playing around thirty dates. Currently he's in Europe. He stops in May and starts again in the US a month later.
He also has a weekly radio show on XM/Sirius satellite radio. This week was the end of season three, his hundredth show. Last year an exhibition of his paintings toured Europe and America, and quickly sold out (Google Bob Dylan Fine Art for more). And now he has a new album as well, a follow-up to two albums that reached the top of the American charts and the previous one that won a slew of Grammy Awards.
But what is most remarkable about Dylan is that he so resolutely refuses to be a nostalgia act. He varies his set-list wildly from night to night (a recent three night run in Amsterdam – at 17 songs per night – yielded 37 different songs). And he plays his new songs.
Go see the Stones and you might hear a couple of tunes from whatever their latest album is. But when Dylan last released an album he rolled into New York playing eight songs a night from it, pretty much half the show.
You can hear a couple of pre-release cuts from Bob's new Together Through Life, at bobdylan.com. They're rather good. The lyrics are co-written by The Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter and it has a fifties Chess Records feel to it, dirty and vital. It's the sound of rock ‘n' roll growing old. With style.