The Rolling Stones, The Who, and Me Still Hobbling Onward

The day after I wrote on this blog my tentative plan to enter an Ocala long-distance running race a week from now, my sporadic lower back pain returned, causing me to hobble around in much the same way as comedian Tim Conway's "old man" character.  I'm confident I'll recover as I have a number of. times in the past and eventually get back to hitting the road, albeit not to Ocala or anywhere else very soon.  In the meantime I'm looking at ancient rock bands like the Rolling Stones and The Who and marvel at them as they keep on touring and (very occasionally) recording.  It's a bit ironic that with the latter, their creative force, Pete Townshend, had left the band in 1983 because, like with the Beatles in 1967, he was tired of touring and wanted The Who just to be a studio band...the others strongly disagreed with him on this.  Now he's all over the place touring, and the last studio album the band released was in 2006.  But wait, they just announced a brand-new album to come out later this year!  Meanwhile, the Stones keep on touring and touring without any plans of coming out with any new original material...but with more than 300 songs in their catalog why should they?  And, after all, they did release in 2016 an album devoted to covers of old blues songs...

Oh, by the way, Paul McCartney, not to be outdone by his old rivals in the music business, has come out with yet another LP, this one titled Egypt Station.  I didn't care all that much for his music after he left the Beatles, although his first two solo releases, McCartney and Ram, were very high-quality. Yet I wonder if I shouldn't have given him more of a listen in his later works...the last song he recorded that I heard was The World Tonight from his 1997 Flaming Pie album and I thought it would have stood well as a Beatles track...

I'm still listening to the radio and trying to like the current output of "hits", but to little avail.  I'm thinking of making a listening project this year to go through the collective output of artists like McCartney, The Who, Rolling Stones, and others...including those later albums in their careers that never get any radio exposure.  And one more "by the way": Pearl Jam's releasing a new album later this year, too.  I have a strong suspicion that the worst songs of these legends of rock are still on a higher level than most of the "popular" music played today...