Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major pop-music artists born around the same time.
John Lennon would have turned 70 last October; Joan Baez had her 70th birthday in January; Paul Simon and George Clinton will reach 70 before the end of this year. Next year, the club of legendary pop septuagenarians will grow to include Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson and Lou Reed. Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia would have also been 70 in 2012.
Perhaps this wave of 70th birthdays is mere coincidence. There are, after all, lots of notable people of all ages. But I suspect that the explanation for this striking cluster of musical talent lies in a critical fact of biography: all those artists turned 14 around 1955 and 1956, when rock ’n’ roll was first erupting. Those 14th birthdays were the truly historic ones.
Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.
“Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,” says Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”
Biography seems to bear this out. When Robert Zimmerman (the future Bob Dylan) turned 14 as a freshman at Hibbing High School in Minnesota, Elvis Presley was releasing his early records, including “Mystery Train,” and Mr. Dylan discovered a way to channel his gestating creativity and ambition. “When I first heard Elvis’s voice I just knew that I wasn’t going to work for anybody, and nobody was going to be my boss,” Mr. Dylan once said. “Hearing him for the first time was like busting out of jail.”
Mr. McCartney, the son of a big-band musician, abandoned his first instrument, the trumpet, after hearing Presley. “It was Elvis who really got me hooked on beat music,” Mr. McCartney has been quoted as saying. “When I heard ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ ” — which was released in 1956, when Mr. McCartney turned 14 — “I thought, this is it.”
The timeline of music history is dotted with such moments. A hundred years ago, the model for 20th-century music took form with Irving Berlin’s popular appropriation of the black music of the day, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” The song sold more than a million copies on the platform of its time, sheet music. The year was 1911, when three future innovators of vernacular, cross-racial music — Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Rodgers and Fletcher Henderson — all turned 14.
In 1929, when the singer Rudy Vallee mastered and exploited the emerging electronic technologies of the microphone and the national radio broadcast to become a progenitor of an intimate, naturalistic style of singing derided by adults as “crooning,” both Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra turned 14.
When the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1964, the 14-year-olds (or soon to be) who were around to experience pop music’s new superstars included Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Gene Simmons and Billy Joel.
I can’t help wondering what a 14-year-old with Mr. Dylan’s gifts and hungers would have done if he had been born three or four years earlier and had hit his teens when pop music was in its pre-rock lull, anesthetized by the over-sugared tunes of Teresa Brewer and Vic Damone. Back then, the drive-ins raged with cool pulp-movie delinquents, like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” Would Mr. Dylan, a movie nut in childhood, have gone into screen acting to channel his rebellious spirit?
Every age makes its own kind of genius. For hints of what the cultural giants of the future will be doing in their own time, we’d be well served to look in the ninth-grade lockers of today. Perhaps one day we’ll witness the transmutation of social networking into an as-yet-unimaginable kind of art — 140-character sonnets or mash-ups of media we haven’t heard or seen yet. Whatever we’ll be celebrating as the legacy of the 70-year-olds of 2067, it will surely belong to the 14-year-olds of 2011.
David Hajdu
