One afternoon during my teenage years, I was listening to Neil Young at high volume when my mother burst into my room to tell me to turn it down. This was a running subject of contention between us: the loud music that she insisted (correctly, as it happened) would damage my hearing. Neil Young, I protested, was a genius; to play him at low volume would be disrespectful. My mother was having none of it.
“If he were a genius,” she retorted, “he wouldn’t be playing an electric guitar.”
I couldn’t help recalling that interaction as I read Jim Windolf’s Where the Music Had to Go: How Bob Dylan and the Beatles Changed Each Other—And the World, a chatty, new popular history that seeks to tell the story of how rock and roll morphed from disposable entertainment into art. One key to this process, in Windolf’s view, is the influence his subjects had on one another, but equally essential, I’d suggest, is time. “We thought, at best, the Beatles would last a couple of years,” Paul McCartney admitted in 2009. And yet, 64 years after Dylan and the Beatles released their first official recordings, the living artists are still at work. “Dylan and McCartney have maintained their dedication to art into their eighties,” Windolf observes. “They can never be sure if they have lost the thing that makes them great, but they go on anyway.” This perseverance is what interests me most now about these artists: a new interpretation of what the theorist Theodor Adorno defined as “late style.”
I am roughly as old as those early Beatles and Dylan releases, and I find myself seeking models for how to age gracefully. Earlier, I sought such lessons from John Lennon; I admired his decision, in 1975, to walk away from stardom in favor of family life. Now with Lennon long gone and my children grown, I am left to look to others, including Dylan, who still grinds out 80-plus nights on the road each year as if he were some wizened bluesman, and McCartney, whom I saw in concert last September, at the beginning of the 2025 leg of his Got Back Tour.
That McCartney show was revelatory, and not only because it was the first time I’d seen him live. It resonated partly because I wasn’t sure what to expect. Despite his talents, McCartney has never been my favorite Beatle. His songs can sound facile to my ear. I haven’t kept up with his music in any regular way since the 1980s, though I have paid attention to his recent retrospective projects: McCartney 3, 2, 1, the 2021 documentary series he made with Rick Rubin, and Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Get Back, released later the same year. A similar rearview perspective marked the concert I saw. The highlights included “In Spite of All the Danger,” among the first songs the Beatles (then known as the Quarrymen) ever recorded, in 1958, and “Now and Then,” the “final” Beatles song, made from a late ’70s Lennon home recording and released in 2023.
This kind of performance, I’ve come to think, represents late style through another filter. It represents a lesson, or a gift. Adorno defines late style as “furrowed, even ravaged.” These are works “devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny,” that “do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.” The description certainly applies to Dylan—both the music and the persona. But McCartney offers us a different point of view. Although he’s continued to make music (a new album, The Boys of Dungeon Lane, comes out later this month), his late style may be found in the fresh resonances he brings to older work on stage.
The bulk of McCartney’s setlist consisted of Beatles songs—more than 20 of them—but the show didn’t feel like a nostalgia tour, because the effect was less sentimental and more elegiac. What I’m saying is that it was impossible not to sense the ghosts. A version of George Harrison’s “Something,” performed in part on a ukulele that the guitarist had given him, honored one loss. McCartney’s duet with a video of Lennon framed “I’ve Got a Feeling” as a memento mori of another kind. Even “Maybe I’m Amazed,” a love song written for his first wife, Linda, now must exist in the shadow of her death, its exuberance refracted through the lens of grief. By the end of the night it was this history I felt most deeply, in songs bearing the weight of inheritance.
In that sense, the works have aged along with the performer. They affect both the artist and the audience. McCartney is not David Lee Roth, who on his current tour looks ridiculous in dyed hair and leopard-print pants. The ex-Beatle is not pretending he is still young. Rather, he is reimagining and reframing his body of work. He reminds me more of Thomas Pynchon, whose 2025 novel, Shadow Ticket, published when the author was 88, recasts many of the themes and fascinations of his earlier novels. Or Paul Simon, whose recent shows have begun with a performance of his 2023 album Seven Psalms before segueing into a second set of older music. These artists are not only conscious of their aging; they are also making work out of the relationship between the present and the past.
The idea of a late style in rock and roll would have been unimaginable during the 1960s and early ’70s, the era that Windolf primarily recounts. If nothing else, the timeline was too compressed. “In Spite of All the Danger” was recorded just seven years after the March 1951 release of Ike Turner and Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” considered by many to be the earliest rock-and-roll recording. When the Beatles arrived, rock and roll was in its youth. It was about rebellion, shaking your ass. A big part of the point was that the grown-ups (like my mother) didn’t like it. To take the music too seriously was to operate from an irrelevant paradigm. As Lou Reed is reported to have said, “One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”
The irony is that Reed, like Dylan, sought to position himself as a poet, which is to say an artist. Where the Music Had to Go traces the processes that made such a declaration possible. Windolf’s title implies that rock and roll is ever evolving, broadening its horizons as it grows in sophistication. Those familiar with its history will already know the signposts: Dylan going electric; the producer George Martin adding a string quartet to “Yesterday,” a McCartney composition on which the other Beatles did not play. “Was a Beatles record still a Beatles record,” Windolf wonders, “if it only had one Beatle on it?” A related question might be asked about “Now and Then,” which includes archival recordings of two Beatles, Lennon and Harrison, who are no longer alive.
“This was the birth of Rock,” Windolf writes, quoting the producer Joe Boyd on Dylan’s three-song electric set at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. He continues: “From here on out, in other words, songs created in the old rock ’n’ roll spirit—as a soundtrack for dancing, courtship, or just having fun—were no longer the thing.” I’m not so sure; both Dylan and the Beatles produced plenty of rave-ups after 1965. Nonetheless, I can’t deny that the Newport show, along with the studio wizardry and sonic layering of the Beatles’ 1966 album, Revolver, altered the way music was created and understood. All of a sudden, the territory had expanded. Rock and roll was clearly not a phase, empty calories to consume until the time arrived for heartier fare, but rather something self-sustaining, a means to make a life.
Where the Music Had to Go doesn’t extend far enough into the present to pursue this idea fully. Although the opening chapter begins with Dylan’s 2009 visit to Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool and ends with a 2025 McCartney interview, the evolution he examines remains rooted in the past. Of Dylan and McCartney, Windolf writes: “Both are born entertainers with ever-active creative powers who have proved unable to tear themselves away from studio and stage.” That’s true, but there’s a deeper logic behind why the two continue to perform. “Why would I retire?” McCartney asked an interviewer, also in 2009. “Sit at home and watch TV? No thanks. I’d rather be out playing.” What he’s describing is not the restlessness of youth but creativity as an ongoing, lifelong process. As Dylan and McCartney prove, growing old can be a liberating experience. It allows us to rethink, to clarify or reassess. Late style, in other words, renders creativity more—not less—essential.
I remember discussing “Now and Then,” when it came out, with another Beatles fan, who found the song not only unsatisfying but also unnecessary. “It doesn’t do justice to their legacy,” this person said. But that’s the thing: Legacy is not static; it is ever changing. And it belongs to no one if not the artists themselves. Why shouldn’t McCartney—or, for that matter, Ringo Starr, who at almost 86 is having a late-career renaissance as a country artist—make the music he wishes to make, regardless of how it might be received? And why isn’t that a part of their legacy? Time gives everything a different temperament.
Take, for instance, that McCartney show. I went because he is 83 and I’d never seen a Beatle. In that regard, his presence would have been enough. Yet what I came away with was a set of deeper impressions, not least the sense that I was learning something fundamental about what it means to be human. Call it endurance; call it perseverance. Call it memory and loss. Late style represents neither a footnote nor an epilogue but rather—should an artist live long enough—a necessary point of evolution. It reflects our most essential reckoning: what we do in the face of the unforgiving knowledge that life comes to an end.
*Sources: Getty; Kristy Sparow / Getty; Les Lee / Daily Express / Hulton Archive / Getty; Michael Ochs Archives / Getty.
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