The Oldest Guy at the Gig (Howard Druckman)

I became a senior citizen in 2023.

I don’t look, feel, or act like it.

The passage of time is undeniable, but at a point in life where I’m supposed to be managing my investments, planning my retirement, drawing up my will, and considering other such age-appropriate matters as I contemplate (and, in rare panicky moments, dread) my increasingly looming death, I’m off to the next gig instead.

As a lifelong music lover, I still enjoy going to live performances, not just at the comfortable soft-seat theatres and folk festivals befitting someone my age, but at the same sort of hardscrabble bars and down-at-heel clubs that I frequented in my twenties. More than any other aspect of music, I submit that it’s live shows that most powerfully create community among listeners, and it’s still a thrill for me to see someone tear the roof off the place, or move an audience to tears. Because I’ve kept up with a fair selection of new music, that means I’m almost always the oldest guy at the gig.

Let me explain the “kept up” part. As someone who’s worked for the past 23 years as the Editor in Chief for a national Canadian music rights organization, and with my wife and I never embarking on the never-ending, all-consuming adventure of having children, I’ve managed to keep listening to new music—especially on the Canadian scene. Being one of about 200 Canadian music journalists and broadcasters in the large jury of the Polaris Music Prize—Canada’s annual $50,000 award for the best album in Canada, based on only the music—has also kept me in touch with new music, especially with stuff I don’t normally listen to, in every conceivable genre and subgenre.

Like, in the past decade or so, Jessie Reyez, TOBi, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, DijahSB, Mustafa, LU KALA, The Beaches, Donovan Woods, grandson, Leonard Sumner, Julian Taylor, Haviah Mighty, Exco Levi, Bros. Landreth, renforshort, and more. And, more locally in Toronto, David Celia, Christine Bougie, Mike Evin, Abigail Lapell, Shawn Santalucia… The list goes on, and every one of those artists is worth your time and interest.

Of course, nothing new that I hear now will hit as strongly as the music I heard between 1970 (when I was 12) and 1980 (when I was 22). If you’re a music lover, I suggest that the stuff you really connect with in your adolescence—and that’s stayed with you throughout your life—is impossible to equal. None of those superb, youngish artists I’ve mentioned can connect with me at that deep personal level—expressing things I feel but can’t say, changing my ideas or perspective, inspiring five-times-a-day-full-album listening, that sort of thing. But some combination of their passionate intensity, powerful content, poetic lyricism, and/or engaging sonic craftsmanship still blows me away.

To limit my music appreciation to the sounds of my youth seems like the worst kind of nostalgia. It’s the reason I didn’t go to see a show on the latest Springsteen or Dylan tours; I saw them live in their prime (Dylan with the Band in ’74 and with the Rolling Thunder Revue in ’75, Springsteen in ’75 through ’85), and there’s no way anything they do now can equal that. I’d rather dig the new breed.

So, while fans of Indigenous rappers Snotty Nose Rez Kids are jumping up and down on the dancefloor of a 200-capacity, standing-only club, you’ll find me at the back of the room, swaying (and sometimes singing) along, hooting and hollering, savouring the moment. Or scrunched into my chair at a 20,000-seat hockey/basketball arena, cheering on R&B Godmother of The New Vulnerability™ of the 2000s, Jessie Reyez (opening for Sam Smith), as she graduates from clubland to arenas. Or jammed into a booth at a tiny dance club as force of nature Haviah Mighty performs to celebrate the release of her latest album—and where I’m the oldest guy in the room by four decades.

I realize that, in what passes for the “real” world, there’s something that might appear vaguely ridiculous, or at the very least undignified, about this. SNRK, Jessie Reyez, and Haviah Mighty aren’t making music for someone my age, and I admit that it’s sometimes a little challenging on my 65-year-old legs, and lower back, to stand for the length of an entire set. From the outside, my enthusiasm might seem somewhat forced, but I don’t really care what it looks like. Life’s too short to give a shit about other people’s judgement, and dignity is overrated. The music still moves me, and I still love to experience it in person.

I also still love to interview the people who make it, and to write (or upload video conversations) about what they do. I’ve always been something of a cheerleader for the music I enjoy, and growing older hasn’t diminished that at all. On the contrary, being in touch with the makers of new music keeps me energized and enthusiastic. Not to be too self-congratulatory, but I do think that approaching the interviewing and writing processes with the benefit of age and experience sometimes makes for greater depth in the result.

In rare moments of doubt, I think of longtime Toronto music journalist, editor, and concert promoter Richard Flohil. “Flo” will celebrate his 90th birthday in June of 2024, and he’s still out there at festivals, concert halls, bars, and clubs—enjoying the music, holding court with other music industry folks, and invariably mentioning how many gigs he’s seen so far this year. (I think the tally was more than 150 by the end of 2023.) He also maintains a Substack where he posts regularly about his ongoing musical adventures.

That’s a shining example of aging ungracefully, and one that I hope to follow.