In Praise of Mid-Life Crises

At the relatively tender age of 44, I find myself once again without mooring. No relationship, sort of liking/hating where I live ... but no real oomph to my life. No crazy & passionate hobby, no real raison d'être.

Which is okay. As Dostoevsky said, the true hero is the master of the grey everyday. That's me!

So right now, I'm taking my time trying to put together my next move. And I think time should be taken. One shouldn't rush in to things when one is 44. What one should do is contemplate the choices made by others who have been down this troubled dirty little road.

When Sinatra was in his mid-life crisis, he married the 21 year-old Rosemary Woodhouse, and started recording youth culture music. The "running off with the young girl" thing I get. I understand that entirely. But the "youth culture" music decision? Now, that's madness!

So, let's examine it a bit.

While publicly decrying the puerile aspects of rock and roll ["Rock 'n' Roll is phony and false, and sung, written and played for the most part by cretinous goons"], after a decade of uneasy détente, Sinatra embraced the softest versions of the medium by the late 1960s. One of the odder [and certainly relegated to footnote status in his magnificent oeuvre] things he did was record an album called "Watertown." It was released 38 years ago this week, the same summer of the moon landing, of Woodstock, of the Manson family murders.

The album - a concept album ... a rock-opera lite, as it were - was composed by Bob Gaudio and Jake Holmes. By 1969, Gaudio was a highly successful songwriter and a member of the Four Seasons, whose career at that point was waning. Jake Holmes was a relative newcomer, an up-and-coming singer-songwriter in the mold of Tim Hardin or Tom Rush [Holmes went on to become a fantastically successful jingle writer, responsible for "Be All You Can Be", the US Army catchphrase that has entered into popular lexicon. Oh yeah, and though he is uncredited to this day, he in fact wrote "Dazed and Confused" the song by the most popular English hippie garage band in the world.]

The Watertown suite of songs, set to folk-rock-lite, tells the story of a middle-aged man whose wife, a more ambitious sort, has left him and their two sons. That Sinatra, a man who knew loss, reinvention, and more importantly the price that reinvention extracts, chose to record this concept album is to both really curious and fascinating [What were the sessions like? "Frank, why don't we try more of a Bob Lind thing on that last section?" Yikes!].

So my object lesson from this is in crisis, perhaps you take some risks, you stretch, you try some new things ... without apology or over-analysis. Chairman-style.