Rock and roll is dead.

Well, it is for me, at any rate

Once I was a part of those lucky few whose dreams had become a joyful reality. I was a star. Wielding my guitar onstage in front of thousands of countless smiling, screaming faces I lifted my voice in song and they embraced me under the spotlight as the greatest poet of my generation. I jumped, gyrated and lost myself in the music as the beats and riffs and rhythms of my band-mates enthralled me. Our passion for the craft was true and people listened to us when we spoke. What we had to say mattered to them. It made them happy. It made them sad. But they understood our message. They knew how far we’d come, and that we deserved this chance. And for that we were rewarded.

My father, a gruff, grizzled man to say the least, knew little of this world. He had spent a lifetime with his hands elbow-deep in blood, labouring away as a butcher. It was true to the cliché –‘a simple, but honest life’- and yet as hard as he worked we always struggled to make ends meet. In his mind, only the same hard times he endured, through the passing of a beloved wife and baby girl, were of the stuff that would make a real man. I’d tried my hand at his world, and I did indeed, for a time, try to make it my own. But I had voices calling me from another place. From the spirited voices inspiring me on the radio. From the jazz club on the corner of George and Lawrence, where the men in black puffed so powerfully into their trumpets that cheeks swelled red and I thought they might soon burst. From the first man who taught me to play guitar -Old Joe Clark is all we called him- he told me there was always time to make music. And from the way those girls looked at me when I played guitar. Oh, I knew in my heart almost immediately that my father was due for disappointment. It wasn’t fear of hard, ‘real’ work that led me astray. It was the gates flung wide open calling me in for an introduction to meet the almighty rock and the roll that I could not deny.

It hurt he never had the chance to see where that voice led me. I walked a path to success, to happiness, and to vindication. I hoped that all those fruits might truly wash away the stinging memories of years of curses, arguments and rejection but it was not be. When he passed I was still living in a crowded, rat-infested dive with four other dreamers and still wondering if I shouldn’t sell the guitar and hasten home for a return of the prodigal son. Within five weeks of the funeral we had a record deal and I’d bought my first car. It happens quickly like that sometimes, I guess. I wish it had been quicker.

Amid the rewards of our accomplishments, the mansions, gold records and the women –my, there were many women, and I loved them all the same- we had, of course, our faults and failures. Ego, drugs and money, like so many others, were our triumvirate of evil, and at times they infected every facet our lives. With thanks it was always briefly, but never briefly enough. We’d forget. We forgot hunger. We forgot who we were and where we’d come from. We forgot whom it was we loved and trusted. And we forgot to set aside far too many beer bottles than I’d care to remember. I suppose we fulfilled our every textbook obligation to the highs and lows of rock and roll. More often than not, to our surprise, and sweetly, it was our fans that brought us back together.

But through it all I must concede, I never found my peace. I thought it was I’d found my dream, but nothing ever felt just right. It’s hard to explain or even better, understand, that ever-present feeling in my stomach. It rises to my heart, and upwards, sends my mind restless. At the height of heights I couldn’t help it: I was always looking over the shoulder of the next hill for something more. Perhaps this was ‘the artist’s curse’ -the inner struggle and doubt that provides us the ammunition for inspiration and fresh discovery. Perhaps it was my father’s words, preying on my guilt to live whatever it was that an ‘honest man’s life’ should be. Or worst of all, as I feared, perhaps it was that my dreams were not for me.

I’m not a spoilt man by nature, though I’ve had riches more than most. I know it has been a blessed life. I’ve made music, I’ve had love, and of money I’ll never worry again. No, I’ve surely not been left to starve. Yet nagging, aching, near driving me insane, I’ve not once allowed myself that rest to be happy with what is here and now. This isn’t greed, nor ambition either, it’s something deeper, but clearer to me now, with age- I can’t enjoy the journey, and I don’t rightly know why, but I think it’s because I never knew my real dreams. The music was never enough. If I couldn’t find true happiness in wealth and success and love that would please others a thousand times over then I’m not sure where this all leaves me, but by God I just want to fly to my dreams.

And so it is, that I’m sitting here now, having just entered into my sixty-fifth year and I’m tired. I’m ever so tired. Rock and roll singers were never meant to live this long, and too many years of late nights, excess and unbridled joy have left my face leather and my body crooked. I can’t play guitar like I used to. Fingers have become gnarled with arthritis, and I lost that roar in my voice long, long ago. My lungs feel heavy from too many cigarettes, and I’m sure it’s cancer that pierces at my insides, but as I did when I was twenty, I down another tumbler of scotch and try to will the sickness away. We still perform from time to time, and I fear we’ve become parody but this is all I ever knew. We play now not for wealth or fame, though the crowds are thinner than once they were, and sometimes I try to remember what it was like to sing in one voice with thirty-thousand fans under the cover of a still night.

Often in those heady days I used to pause between songs and glance skyward at the stars shining down on our happiness. The electricity of the moment would coarse through me, but even then I’d be searching for more, and trying to find those dreams of mine, wherever they might be. I think the answer is in those stars, and before the crowds fall completely silent, before this illness claims my life, I’m taking a step forward into the unknown.

I’ve written one last song and sent it on to my friends, and taken enough pills that soon I’ll sleep forever. My bed is ready, and on the stereo a record of our past glories is at full volume to accompany me into slumber. Rock and roll was good to me, and I think I made it better. I certainly had quite a time. There’s more to find though, and there’s more to me, I’m sure of it.

Lying down now, I’ve not felt this way in years, and that electricity is humming through my body once again. On this cold winter’s night, with my last dying breath, I’ll be eyeing that unclaimed reward in the sky’s dancing, shimmering diamonds overhead.

But I’m on my way. My dreams await.