What Happens to Our Idols

They create Blonde on Blonde, Bringing It All Back Home, London Calling, Between the Buttons, Muswell Hillbillies, Abbey Road, All Things Must Pass, Younger Than Yesterday, Beggar’s Banquet, Tommy, A Hard Day’s Night, Moondance, Let It Be, Blood on the Tracks, Let It Bleed. Their faces stare from a vinyl sheath, from under black-and-white mop-top headshots. They glare down the camera in fish-lens panoramas as they are surrounded by headlines. They are faces in the crowd. They stand alone with a guitar and a sailor’s cap. They are embodied by jeans at the crotch, an Andy Warhol zipper. They are scribbled in bubble letters and sketched. They walk across the street barefoot. They smash their guitars on stage. They tip their hats and grin. They urinate against a stone wasteland outhouse. They don’t smile. They are surrounded by darkness. They finger-paint. They are blank, a white slate stamped with nothing more than a name. They appear as fragile as alabaster dolls. What happens plays out over the canvas of years and decades, as we cross wood stages for our graduations and tip bottles to our mouths, as we press our fingers to the glass on frozen afternoons and love, as we marry, divorce, remarry, watch our children, wake to the sound of music.

They are captured black and white in photographs, and in these photographs they are boys. Giggling boys who smoke marijuana. Their hair a tangled mess. Their parents have died in car crashes. Their parents own furniture stores. Their parents don’t carry their names. Our idols come from English poor towns and hard-scrabble Minnesota mining, from Canadian ranches, from Georgia. When their early records first ghost the radio, our idols are too young to even grow beards. There is no facial hair in the black-and-white photographs. They sing. They want to hold your hand, you know? They are bigger than Jesus, but they are burned and cursed, and ultimately sound scared when they try to explain what they mean. Their voices almost crack as they dart and hum.

What happens to our idols is frozen on LPs and stamped bootlegs. In a cramped hall, they pick a rhythm and sing in frosted voice. They enunciate syllables and rend harmonica in winding, breathless solos. They roll their eyes toward the ceiling. They are oblivious to the crowd, caught in their own words, so many words, caught in their own breath. They cannot hear their voices. They sing as if they are lost boys. Our idols exist in a moment in history, hitchhiking to New York with ten dollars to their name, in a time when people read newspaper headlines—youth groups split across the skull with batons, dogs and fire hoses, everything burning. The skeletons of Europe roll past their cars, an overgrowth across shattered towns, the fields burnt and regrown, but still charred.

They stop singing protest, they drop their acoustics to dress in salmon polka-dot shirts and strap-on Fenders. They are bright and vibrant and booed over poor sound or sellout tendancies or the tingle of electricity, that ghost so elegantly crafted in a dark concert hall in England. In Manchester they are labeled Judas. They play fucking loud in Manchester. Some of them wander offstage to die in French alleyways. Some of them host free concerts in California and watch a boy stabbed by angels. Some of them crash their motorcycles outside of Woodstock and break their necks, returning as bearded country minstrels who sing in the husky tones of prophets. Some of them are like some of us, as we hope for God at our crossroads.

Because they spend the majority of their lives singing, their voices change through the years, sometimes betraying them. They are operatic when they are 25. They bellow and shout. They are strutting and smooth. They hit somewhere between the spoken word and song. They shift, before the onset of arthritis or mesothelioma or cancer. They smoke, heavily. At the age of 69 their voices cannot carry their early tunes. To compensate they force...