Pete Townshend of The Who struck a nerve with rock ‘n’ roll rebels in 1965 with the line “I hope I die before I get old.”
But something has happened in the five decades since he wrote “My Generation”: The boomer generation got older, yet continued to love rock ‘n’ roll. Now, as many of those early fans enter retirement, they are still boarding buses and trudging through muddy fields to see their favorite bands.
“It used to be that when you retired, you went to Leisure World or the old retirement complex,” said Mark Hover, a 65-year-old who lives in Moreno Valley, California, and retired in 2004 after 30 years working for the United Parcel Service. Now, he said, other options are more appealing to him.
“What you’re supposed to do in your golden years is more of what you love,” he said. “What I’ve loved all my life is going to see live music.” He attends more than 100 shows a year, spending thousands of dollars traveling to concerts and multiday rock festivals like Bonnaroo, in Manchester, Tennessee, which he plans to attend in June. He finds that he is far from the only “old guy” — his term — rocking out.
Concerts aimed at old guys are big business. According to music industry tracking firm Pollstar, the six-day music extravaganza Desert Trip, featuring The Who and fellow rock veterans like the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and Neil Young, took in $160 million last year. Held in Indio, California, the festival catered to “an older, more affluent crowd,” Pollstar said. Hover was there, and paid $399 for his ticket.
Tickets to other concerts and festivals likely to draw audiences old enough to remember Woodstock — among them the just-announced Classic East and Classic West, with headliners Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, scheduled for New York and Los Angeles this summer — are also selling robustly.
Hover said he likes younger acts, such as the Raveonettes, too. Online ticketing service Eventbrite found in a 2015 study conducted by the Harris Poll that 44 percent of people ages 51 to 70 are attending more live shows than they did in 2005. Of those concertgoers, 40 percent say they want to stay abreast of current tastes.
“My generation had this thing about, don’t trust anyone over 30,” said Sheldon Donig, 70, a retired developer from San Anselmo, California. “But age doesn’t seem to be an issue at the festivals I go to. Younger people don’t seem to be ageist.” He said he plans to take his RV in June to the Kate Wolf Music Festival in Laytonville, California, and in August to the Oregon Eclipse in Crook County, Oregon.
For many retirees, concertgoing is a lifestyle, and not a new one. “It’s not like we were playing golf and all of a sudden quit and started seeing shows,” Donig said. “We’ve been doing this since we were in our 20s.” The difference now, he said, is that they can do more of it.
Bob McAdam, 74, a retired CVS pharmacist from Bourne, Massachusetts, also dived deep into live music after retiring in 2014. He says he attends roughly 150 concerts or festivals a year, twice as many as when he was working. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t play golf, and I don’t have a second home in Florida,” he said. “Music is my only hobby.”
McAdam has built a social network through his showgoing. “You get to know people, and you keep in touch with some of them,” he said. He has little time for peers of his who have given up on contemporary music.
“A lot of people not even my age, but a lot younger, have this idea that Led Zeppelin was the best thing you could listen to and that there’s nothing worth listening to anymore,” McAdam said. “That’s just wrong. Also, hearing new music keeps you current.”
Occasionally, it can exhaust you. “Festivals are thought of as a younger person’s game because it can be challenging to be out in the summer sun from morning till dusk two or three days in a row,” said Jeffrey Schneider, 54, a lawyer from Dix Hills, New York, who plans to retire in the next year or two to focus on concertgoing. “You need stamina. But as Warren Zevon said, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’”
Festival logistics can be especially hard on retirees with health issues, like Timothy Sanford-Wachtel, 68, a presiding workers’ compensation judge in Riverside, California, who has survived cancer. Sanford-Wachtel is planning his impending retirement around concerts and festivals. “Sometimes it’s tough to navigate my walker around 100,000 people,” he said. “But I always tell people I’m not going to quit until the Rolling Stones do.”
Dan Berkowitz, chief executive of CID Entertainment, a Philadelphia company that offers concert travel packages, said retirees tend to expect a smooth operation. “People who are a bit older have the reputation of being demanding,” he said, because they know they should not have to wait in line 45 minutes to get past security and should not be stuck behind a billboard so they can’t see the stage. Because of retirees’ influence, he said, festival organizers, especially at shows like Desert Trip, which he described as “generally luxurious, as far as festivals go,” operate more carefully.
While clients in their 50s and older represent about 15 percent of his business, they account for about half the attendance at shows that cater to them, like Desert Trip and Fare Thee Well, a 2015 series of concerts by the surviving members of the Grateful Dead. One client in this age group, who has been going to Bonnaroo for eight years, regularly arranges for five or six buses to travel to the festival through CID. “He’s done well for himself, and when it comes time for him to have a bit of fun, he likes to bring his family and friends along,” Berkowitz said.
Millennials are often said to value experience over material things, but Berkowitz says he associates that sensibility with his most senior clients. “They know they’re not going to remember that one year they bought a new TV or got a car with an upgraded moon roof,” he said. “They’re going to remember seeing their favorite artists with family or friends.”
Jill Seagraves, 61, of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, couldn’t agree more. “My parents used to like to watch golf on TV with drinks on a Sunday afternoon,” she said. “That’s nothing that ever interested me.” Instead, traveling to see festivals like Desert Trip has kept her occupied, and happy, since her children left home; she is a retired homemaker.
“There’s going to be a day where people like Neil Young don’t play anymore, and I want to be at their last tour,” she said. “I want to die with a wristband around my wrist.”
