Loving Every Minute of It

A lesson in why it's better to fade away than burn out.

If you’re a fan of music, then you know the world of Rock and Roll is not exactly a forgiving one – especially as it relates to age. A simple internet search will yield videos of Vince Neil butchering the lyrics of Mötley Crüe songs as he attempts to sing or, most recently, a 90-year-old Frankie Vallie standing on stage clearly lip-synching his hits while the proletariat passes judgement by suggesting it’s time to stop performing. It seems that, as a society, we’ve fully embraced the Neil Young line from 1978 that “it’s better to burn out than fade away.”

A couple of weeks ago, I attended my first (and possibly last) true arena rock show in about a decade. It was the “Best of All Worlds” tour by the former lead singer of Van Halen, Sammy Hagar. He assembled an all-star support cast to pay tribute to my favorite guitar player and the show was, in short, incredible.

As is the case with most tours, Sammy Hagar employed an opening act to get the capacity crowd amped up before he hit the stage with countless Van Halen hits. For the show in Nashville, it was Loverboy. For those of you unfamiliar with the Canadian rock band, they were an FM radio staple with a string of hits in the early 1980s such as “Turn Me Loose,” “The Kid is Hot Tonite,” “Hot Girls in Love,” “Lovin’ Every Minute of It,” and their most famous track, “Working for the Weekend.” After a frenetic five-year run, they seemingly burned out and became part of the tapestry of a bygone era.

I had seen pictures of the singer, Mike Reno, that showed him clearly overweight which made me wonder about the quality of his performance. Frankly, I didn’t expect much more than a predictable, if not pedestrian, set of hits – sort of a collective yawn before the main event began.

Along with 18,000 other people, I was wrong.

While he wasn’t the svelte, red-leather-pants-wearing, early-80s rock god we remembered him to be, he – along with the band – sounded fantastic. That was a big surprise, but what really stunned me was his stage presence: he unabashedly owned the person he is at age 69. As you can see by the video I shot below, he showed everyone that he could command the stage regardless of his physical appearance. It was truly magnificent.

Far too often, we don’t allow people we admire to get old without taking a few shots at them or commenting on how they haven’t “aged well.” Honestly, I’ve been guilty of that as well, but my experience watching Mike Reno front Loverboy really shifted that perspective for me. In our business lives, how often do we immediately discount someone and their accomplishments simply because they look different than we either remember or picture them?

Perhaps a better approach is to judge people on what truly matters: the value they bring to the table. IF we use that as a baseline, we all might be a bit more forgiving to our idols who, perhaps, don’t age as gracefully as society demands.  

The fact is that Father Time remains undefeated. We will all (hopefully) live to a ripe old age. As we do, we might lose our hair, gain a few pounds, have a lot more wrinkles, or all of the above. However, none of that automatically diminishes past victories or the promise of future value. By any measure, Mike Reno killed it - he hit the high notes, sang on key, and gave a very eager audience a fabulous performance. The best part, not one of us cared that he had put on a few pounds or that his hair was grey. The only thing that mattered was the epic performance.

The lesson for me: it’s far better to fade away than burn out.