Angel Jaramillo Torres
Every year, we say goodbye to great rock geniuses who, however, are always reborn through their timeless songs.
In the year of our Lord 2000—when the century was barely twelve days old—I arrived in Manhattan, while discreet snowflakes reflected off the neon lights of the best city in the world.
The next day, I wore myself out walking up and down avenues and streets until I collapsed in a diner, which is now on the verge of extinction as organic food establishments are replacing them. Who will save us from ourselves?
Earlier, I had picked up a copy of the Village Voice from a newsstand. Over a plate of scrambled eggs with home fries, I looked for the concert section. What I found was a rock fan’s Shangri-La. I rubbed my eyes: that week, you could choose from concerts by bands that could only come together in New York in seven days. That year, you could have gone to a Prince concert, who truly deserves the title of King of Pop—or see The Eagles play, which for me was the equivalent of a pagan ritual, as their songs resonated with me like something manufactured by nature.
During my stay in the city that never sleeps, I had the opportunity to go to a handful of concerts, but I must say that the one I remember most vividly was Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden. I lost my voice after singing Born to Run, just like the girl beside me. The New Jersey native had every reason to feel like she was in rock heaven: her idol was her fellow countryman.
A quarter of a century later, the souls of the classic period of Anglo-Saxon rock—that secular contribution of pagan art to the human spirit—have been dying out.
Not a week goes by without us hearing that some legendary member of a rock band from the ’70s or ’80s has fled the mysterious chain of causes and effects we call our world.
I, for one, still can’t believe that David Bowie is dead. Why did the greatest mathematical mind the world of rock ever conceived betray me when the soul pact was that he would live as long as I could sing his songs? Why did the unmistakable voice of Rick Ocasek of The Cars suffer extinction in 2019? Wasn’t he supposed to be with us until the end of time? And why did the flame-throwing guitarist Eddie Van Halen bid farewell without saying goodbye in a Santa Monica hospital emergency room on October 6, 2020?
Taking stock of the great rockers who have left us in the last two decades is like reviewing the soundtrack of our lives. Remember that party at Cuauhtémoc where you danced with that smoky girl to the beat of “Careless Whisper” by a band called Wham? Goodbye, George Michael.
We still have the two main members of Their Satanic Majesties. Richards and Jagger continue to combine the iconic voice of rock with hellish riffs. Long may they continue.
Of the four geniuses from Liverpool, the charismatic big nose and the artist with the velvety voice, who was (is) also a genius of melody, are still with us.
We also have Bob Dylan, the singer-songwriter whom the Swedish Academy honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature. Few deserved that recognition as much as the poet Robert Allen Zimmerman from Duluth, Minnesota.
Despite everything, as in Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” rock doesn’t get older, it gets younger. We know this because we feel rejuvenated whenever we hear those songs of steel storms: “Oh, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now…”
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