ROD STEWART, 81, CONFIRMS FINAL TOUR AFTER HEART PROCEDURE AND HEALTH SCARES:
Rod Stewart is ready for one final encore.
The rock legend announced “The Final Encore Tour” Monday, revealing that next year will mark his last-ever tour after facing a series of health issues.
“Well, here we go… one last time!” Stewart wrote on Instagram. “Come and see me on my The Final Encore Tour for one more round of rock ’n’ roll. I’m really looking forward to it.”
Stewart opened up about his decision to make the tour his last in an emotional video message.
“Ladies and gentlemen, after much deliberation and sadness, I have to announce next year will be my last tour ever, ever, ever,” he told fans.
“I’m not retiring, but this will be the last rock and roll tour,” he clarified.
“I wanna thank you for everything you’ve given me, and hopefully I’ve given you something in return,” Stewart said before singing, “Please come out and see me on the tour. It’s gonna be great!”
In 2021, Damon Linker wrote: What Rock Fans Don’t Want to Admit.
The recent death of Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts at the age of 80 is just the latest rude reminder of what all of us know in our bones but nonetheless choose to ignore most days: The classic rock era is nearly dead and buried — and so are its greatest icons.
I wrote about this two years ago, and, inevitably, things are looking even bleaker now. Bob Dylan is 80. Paul McCartney and Paul Simon are 79. And not far behind them are a host of rock stars well into their 70s: Brian Wilson, Carole King, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Ray Davies, Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend, Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Debbie Harry, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Bryan Ferry, Elton John, and Don Henley. James Taylor and Jackson Browne just completed a tour together; the former is 73, the latter 72. The baby of the bunch, Bruce Springsteen, currently wrapping up another residency on Broadway, turns 72 next month.
Over the next decade, most of these superstars are going to die, and the remaining holdouts soon after. On one level, this will be a terrible loss. These are people we care about deeply, who write and perform music that means the world to us.
But if we’re honest, we also have to admit that the loss is largely a function of nostalgia, of feelings attached to sounds and sights from long ago. Yes, many of these legends still take to the road to play live. Some produce new music from time to time. But none of these artists — not one — is doing work to rival the quality of what they produced at their peak. And in every case, that high point was decades ago.
And after they’re gone, sadly comes what Kyle Smith dubbed in 2019, The Great Forgetting:
As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.
To Kill a Mockingbird? Atticus Finch is literature’s most celebrated rape apologist!
