Research Indicates That Cognitive Deterioration Typically Accelerates in Ones 70s

According to an article in The Atlantic, “Research indicates that cognitive deterioration typically accelerates in one’s 70s.” I find this to be true.
Just today, I found that I could not remember all the names of the members of The Tubes. There is, of course, Fee Waybill (aka John Waldo), Roger Steen, Bill “Sputnik” Spooner (from the old days), Prairie Prince, Vince Welnick (who left to join the Grateful Dead and later died), and Rick Somebody, the bass player. I think his last name was *(to be filled in when I remember)*. There was also, back in the 1970s, Re Styles. Why should I remember such things? It is because, I learned of them long after their respective heydays.
The same is true of The Band, Talking Heads and Depeche Mode. Well, Depeche Mode not so much so. How I came to be interested in Depeche Mode is through a quite different process, about which, more in due course. I used to take my daughter to Tubes concerts at New George’s in San Rafael as well as Konocti Harbor and Tahoe North Shore, and the El Dorado Saloon in Sacramento. Spooner was still with them in those days, while Waybill (Waldo) was playing softball in Los Angeles, and getting bit parts in movies such as Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, in which he played “one of the three most important people in the world”. Today, The Tubes play well in Europe, and on the East Coast. It is good to have a hedge for retirement for they are all getting a bit long in the tooth. Although Charles Lempriere “Prairie” Prince is very tight with Todd Rundgren (remember the group Nazz Nazz, back in the late 1960s?)
We have seen bassist Tina Weymouth and drummer Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads as Tom-Tom Club. Likewise, I caught Jerry Harrison and Casual Gods in St. Louis with Alex Weir on bass and Bernie Worrell on keyboard, all of the Talking Heads …somewhere around 1988 or 1989.
I learned about The Band one bleak night in San Antonio. We were at an NSTA convention. She had gotten a cold. She agreed to stay with me that night if she could curl up with a Coke and watch something on television. I had stopped wayching television a few years before. She found something that interested her. It was the Last Waltz.
Of course, I had heard “The Night They Burned Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek” before, but I never knew that the name of the band was The Band. In Fact, when I heard that some band had taken the name The Band, I was offended by their perceived degree of pretension.
Given the negative alternative, we watched the movie, and she stayed the night.
Thus my knowledge of The Band was born. In retrospect, there was a degree of bogosity in the film.
As a side note, The Band gained a degree of success, yet, in the film, they bragged about shoplifting food from a market. Did they go back to the markets from which they stole food, and compensate them? The subject is not discussed in the film, thus seems to be condoned.
The main bogosity is in the apparent camaraderie between musicians who regularly fight for the same scrap of red meat. Could it be that all those presented in the film were represented by the same Label? Petty jealousies have been known to occur. In the late 1980s, I caught a Bob Dylan concert at Concord Pavilion. Among his back-up guitarists was Joe Satriani, who did a “stand out’ solo. A week or two later, I caught Dylan in Sacramento by which time he had fired Satriani. Bob Dylan was a prick.
So, I will tell you about my affection for Depeche Mode. At Tower, I kept seeing the video from a group called Depeche Mode. There was something about the graphic that offended me. It seemed to be somehow “too special” or too “self-important”. I had had my fill of hypesters touting the heroic nature of a certain “hero of rock and roll”, to be un-named”. Actually, there was only one writer who pushed the “hero of rock and roll” as being the genuine article. Every fucking night, on the local news, there would be a “list” of the “ten most handsome men in America”, or the “ten most iconic rock stars in America”, or the “ten most well-dressed men in America” … and every time number nine or ten would be the “would-be hero of rock and roll”. The hype of Bruce Springsteen was mind numbing. My vehement disgust with the hyping of “The Hero of Rock and Roll” became so over-powering that I had to say to myself, “Let’s take another look”.
So, I bought a Springsteen CD. It was not disgusting. Neither was it heroic. That led me to purchase a recording of Depeche Mode. Depeche Mode is heroic.

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