Is there a point to being a famous musician anymore?

Fame is fleeting to the dinosaur legends too.

It seems that because an entire generation of once-famous musicians are slowly dying off, one-by-one, the inclination to think of these people as famous, just doesn't seem to matter anymore.

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Who were the rock stars of my youth?

Peter Frampton was the catalyst for me wanting to learn how to play the guitar in 1976. I was a 13-year-old punk kid with no direction and no identity. The guitar gave me that direction, that identity and a new voice. Music engulfed me as a practicing instrumentalist. I had an endless list of rock stars to look up to. This was my normal. My best friends and I shared our record albums and tapes. We all knew the same music and listened to all of it everyday. That music became the soundtrack to our youth.

By the time I got into high school, boomboxes were all the rage. It was common to see kids walking through the school hallways, carrying large radios. The outside staircases to the school entrances were the hangout spots for the burnouts and the druggies. Kids sat outside, smoked their cigarettes and cranked their radios. I had my medium-size Panasonic boombox. I carried it with me everywhere. I would record music onto tape and play it for my friends at school.

Disco was still a thing in the late 1970's, but it was quickly dying out with that earlier generation. Rock and pop music was still as strong as it had been since the 1950's. I was listening to jazz fusion and trying to learn how to play complicated music on my bass guitar. I began adding musicians like Stanley Clarke, Jean-Luc Ponty, Al Di Meola and Spyro Gyra to my collection. I still listened to my rock music. My early collection of vinyl consisted of Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Foreigner, Aerosmith, Heart, Kansas, The Eagles, Styx, Van Halen and Yes. These were only a handful of artists who were hugely famous back in those days.

1980's Punk, New Wave and Glam-Big Hair Rock.

By the time I was out of high school, the music heartbeat of the day was quickly changing into something I didn't really gravitate to right away. My then best friend, Mark, was into the Clash, the Ramone's and all of the punk stuff. I never understood his attraction to that music. I didn't get it. Then New Wave sort of melded into the fabric of pop music. Some of it I liked. I would go to parties and hear this strange keyboard music. Bands like The B 52's, Thomas Dolby and Talking Heads were weird to me. I didn't hate it. Then I heard songs from the new Synchronicity album by The Police. This was really good stuff. I knew very little about that band, but I liked it enough to pay attention. The Cars and The Pretenders made it to the radio, and it all sort of became part of what everyone was listening to in the early 1980's.

By the time I was working full time in my early twenties, I inadvertently created a rebellious chip on my shoulder. I rode a motorcycle, had lots of money in my pockets, and I stopped listening to my parents. I was becoming more and more defiant and independent. I needed new music to be part of that cycle of my life. I discovered hair bands like Ratt, Krokus, Saxon, Judas Priest, Kick Axe, Dokken, Motley Crue, and of course, Ronnie James Dio and Rainbow. I went through this phase of anger and rebellion, and that music was my motivation to find my way out of youthful, idealistic ignorance, and find a way to move on in the world and become a real man.

1990's Nirvana and the end of classic rock.

I remember hearing Teen Spirit, and really not getting why this particular song was so popular. This was the anthem for the next generation. Grunge had gained enough power in such a short period of time to put an end to the hair band era, once and for all. It took a while, but I eventually began to pay more attention to this new era of music. It was the soundtrack to an entire lost generation of kids who were where I was, twenty years earlier. I had my rebel music, now they had theirs. I remember sitting on the living room floor of my apartment. I had the local rock radio station on my monster home stereo. The news came out that Kurt Cobain had died. I honestly didn't think anything of it at the time, because I really wasn't attached to that music. I just thought of it as just one more musician who tragically ended his life. By the late 1990's, grunge had grown and matured into a more progressive version of its earlier identity. Bands like Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots and Pearl Jam had rewritten the template for rock music.

Then the digital era came.

I vividly remember the time frame just after the events of September 11, 2001. I remember thinking about and anticipating that a whole brand new era of music would soon envelop and encompass the feelings and the sorrow of a heartbroken nation. I thought this because I had seen and heard it once before. I remembered as a kid, all of the music that had been created during the Vietnam conflict, and how that music had become the voice of a generation of teenagers in the 1960's. It was the music of healing and resolve. We needed that same thing to happen after 9/11, but it never came.

Instead, the digital revolution began with Napster and file sharing. The music industry got lost and reacted far too slowly to keep up with the new changes in the way people were purchasing, stealing, absorbing and digesting music. People stopped buying record albums and cassette tapes. They stopped buying CD's. Napster became a tool where anyone could steal as much free music as they could download onto their computer. By the time Napster had been deemed defunct, the damage had already been done.

The music industry basically disappeared and so did all of the lost revenue in album sales. This was just the beginning. In 2007, the first smartphone became available to the public. Social media became the next revolution to change the world. Then online streaming became a thing; and old artists and bands didn't know what to do. Fake music, fake news, fake everything has since become the norm. The rock stars of yesteryear have slowly become forgotten icons of a once monster global industry that had lasted for decades.

Today.

Everyday, we hear or read about yet another musician or celebrity who died. The younger generations have no idea who these people are, and they don't really care. All of my music heroes of my youth are slowly fading into obscurity. All we have left is the memories of the music from long ago. Some of these artists and bands still try to go out on the road, tour and play their antiquated music, but it just isn't what it used to be. These dinosaur rock stars can't sing anymore, so they alter their classic songs by lowering the keys to so they can attempt to sing to them. They change some of them so much that they become unrecognizable fodder for would-be wealthy dentists and lawyers who go to these shows for nothing more than bragging rights. I really don't want to hear Hotel California in a key a step-and-a-half lower than the original. I don't want to hear Sammy Hagar sing old Van Halen songs in a lower key either.

Old once-famous musicians are desperately trying to hold onto the fame of their past with little or fading success. Some probably should have walked away from it years ago. I figure that within the next decade or so, most of the legends of my youth will be long gone. Most of the celebrities I grew up seeing on TV and in the movies will all disappear as well. The unfortunate part of it all is how little value in old fame even exists anymore. Ask a teenager today if they've ever heard of Peter Frampton, and most of them will shrug their shoulders with a blank stare and ask, "Who's that?"

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