Staying Power and Adaptability

When you think about it, the great musical artists that first began emerging in the mid-sixties accomplished something no rock, pop or even rock'n'roll musicians have accomplished before or since. They had the will and the musical skill to keep their work relevant and contemporary over time. Only when pure exhaustion and a drying up the creative well took over did these artists bow out, and even then, they could come out to play with great skill for special occasions. The rock and rollers of the fifties always played the musical style of their era of fame -- they never changed. The crooners of the early sixties never evolved (with the exception of Neil Sedaka, who revived his career in the seventies as a singer/songwriter). The New Wavers and Hair Metalists never became relevant again, except on the nostalgia/reunion circuit. A crop of musicians who emerged as talents in the mid to late sixties were a different breed. For them, musical inspiration was the main thing, not just giving the crowd what presumably the crowd wanted. Instead, they taught the crowd to appreciate new things. So whenever new musical textures, palettes, instruments, dynamics, voicing, and idioms became available, they adapted them to their central need to express something fresh artistically from within themselves. They kept evolving, and the best of them remained true to their core artistic self through all the different musical tools of which they availed themselves over time. If they ever lost this sense of who they were as real creative people, they crashed up on the rocks of musical superficiality, and many of them did lose their way in the eighties when music producers and record company executives developed an autonomic fetish for the predominance of synthesizers (which had once been tastefully used in the seventies) but became a musically-ephemerizing monster of the succeeding decade. Yet many of those sixties artists who were still determined to make authentic music, but who had been tricked into making one of those cod-New Wave albums, soon recovered their true sense of artistic identity and came out with great albums that proved that non-computerized music is still the most satisfying to the soul and the imagination. Today, we cannot even speak of musicians adapting. Most groups only last two to four albums, and then, they move on to become computer technicians or tattoo artists (or some such obscure profession). In the hyper-drive fickleness of today's culture, we have rendered our pop musicians more disposable than even their music. Be that as it may, here are some good groups or artists rooted in the sixties to follow through the musical changes of culture in the latter half of the twentieth century (though some of them, admittedly, don't break through the eighties barrier, while others find resurrection on the other side of the eighties, or, miraculously, manage to make meaningful music amidst the surface gleam of the eighties milieu): The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles (and the solo careers of its various members), The Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Yes, Steve Winwood, Joni Mitchell, Crosby-Nash, Stephen Stills, Van Morrison, Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, Carlos Santana, King Crimson, Genesis, Peter Gabriel.