How many of you have happened to attend concerts where the singer, frankly, couldn't take it anymore? Especially in recent years, when the headliners of the giant festivals and the protagonists of all the biggest dates have been dinosaurs worthy of Isola Nublar, a reunion of elderly rockers who are always lively, ready to make sparks among electronic teleprompters, stratospheric lights and smokes, pre-recorded help and out of breath after the first jumps, we saw and heard sometimes embarrassing live performances from the frontmen. Easy to judge, start the shitstorm on social media, but after watching the documentary on Bon Jovi Thank You, Goodnight (we tell you about it here) it is impossible not to be overcome by empathy towards an honest rocker who has lost his voice and who is pining to find it again.
Whether you like Bon Jovi or not, one of the first bands close to sounds related to metal that entered the homes of Italians from TV, from videos in high rotation on MTV or Videomusic, it is difficult to ignore the fact that they were the band of tip of the American hard rock of the 80s and 90s, famous all over the globe, who have churned out singles of undoubted fame from Livin' On a Prayer to It's My Life passing through the panty rippers to the Always. Songs that have become modern mythology thanks to the sexy and scratchy voice of the leader Jon Bon Jovi, capable of reaching very high notes while remaining masculine and blending perfectly with that of former companion Richie Sambora. What happens when the others in the band, those who play the instruments, always manage to hit all the notes while you, the singer, remain out of breath? A beautiful Danish psychodrama with dark hues, which hurts to watch, because we empathize with the good Jon, who unlike many colleagues has aged physically well, is in shape, and has not had a facelift or dyed his hair, he really knows about cliché of a good, hard-working American man who can no longer work.
While images of the band's glorious history flow in the documentary, the counterpoint to the present is given by a sixty-year-old gentleman who has destroyed his vocal cords and is no longer able to give a dignified concert. Who spends hours damning himself with vocal warm-ups, laser therapy, until the final choice of surgery to reconstruct the vocal cords to try everything (it's still too early to understand whether it was successful or not). An applause for the honesty with which Jon Bon Jovi decided to tell the world his drama, which is the one shared by many of his generation, close to his musical genre.
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It makes you think of the Guns N' Roses reunion in which Axl Rose's voice has now lost all its grit, remaining a pale and feeble shadow of what was the coolest voice in rock. He can take the notes, but he no longer has the bite, the nastiness, that scratchiness that distinguished him when he was young (for the record he also had some vocal problems on the 2022 tour). If in 1989 he claimed that a line of coke would knock out his voice for a week, today it seems the problem is no longer drugs, but aging. The old Ozzy Osbourne managed to do solo or reunion tours with Black Sabbath only until a few years ago, but listening to him was painful. He no longer seemed to be able to sing, as did Paul Stanley of Kiss, who on yet another Final Tour was often accused of using pre-recorded tracks because he was no longer able to sing the songs properly.
We were gentlemen and we still haven't bothered the stony guest, Mr. Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe, also engaged in yet another career-ending tour, more painful to listen to every year, with that tone of a seagull hit by a stone, although he continues to say in interviews that his voice after all these years is probably the best ever. Fans around the world don't think so at all. Same condition for David Lee Roth who although he claims to have never had any disappointment with his own voice, in reality he is as breathless as the harmoniums mentioned in Streets of the East of Battiato.
Not just metal: let's take a singer who made rock history, Bono. We can say that U2's music was interesting as long as his voice was able to travel freely from bottom to top, moving entire stadiums. Since he can no longer reach his notes, the fall has been unstoppable.
One would say: well, it's age's fault. And instead it is not a problem that concerns everyone in the sector, because Alice Cooper, Klaus Meine of Scorpions, Joey Tempest of Europe, Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden and many others are always in good shape and sing as if they had indestructible tracheas and vocal cords of titanium. Then there are those who decide, like Michael Sweet of Stryper, to lower the songs by half a tone or a tone to accommodate their vocal abilities which are no longer as good as they used to be, especially on the high notes; there are those who, like the already mentioned Jon Bon Jovi decides to speak openly to fans about his problems with his voice and the internal drama he went through to try to sing like he used to. Or someone like Eddie Vedder, after having voice problems in 2018 in London, said: “The doctor was examining me and I told him that I would give him 10 thousand pounds to have a voice like Adele's.” The doctor in question must have been quite nice because he replied: “That's a million dollar voice, for £59 I can make you look like Liam Gallagher.”
There are also artists who embrace the passing of time and decide to change register like Robert Plant, who as he gets older no longer chases the vocal surges of Led Zeppelin, but adapts the songs to a more blues style: «The full-voiced falsetto that I was able to do in 1968 set me apart until I got bored,” he explained to the Los Angeles Times. “Then, that sort of vocal performance with the exaggerated personality transformed and went somewhere else.” Of course, it's no coincidence that Deep Purple's Ian Gillan stopped singing years ago Child in Time and that he has repeatedly compared that song to the pole vault for Olympic athletes. The ever-lamented Chris Cornell, speaking of his aging voice, said in 2015: «As time passes, I have a smaller vocal range and I no longer have the possibility to easily switch between different registers as in the past, on the other hand I feel as if I had a greater ability to connect with all the songs. It is an ever-moving target, the human voice is not like a trumpet or a piano, it changes continuously and the singer must go with the flow.”
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But what happens to the voice of an aging singer? Matteo Ratti of VEM Coaching, vocal coach specialized in rock vocals, explains that the vocal cords for the singer are like the tendons for the athlete and that the singer should not overindulge too much, nor do grueling tours of 20 dates a month because he should have always a way to recover the physical form of the voice. Furthermore, the highest notes are those that are lost first over time. Singers of the 70s or 80s – in all likelihood – had little access to voice professionals to improve and economize their singing, or they had to deal with classical singers who taught them the basic rules of volume, but which do not apply to everyone, especially when talking about miked voices.
Some voices, especially the more scratched ones, which seem very expensive in terms of vocal cords to us, are actually much cheaper and – listened to without a microphone – much less powerful than we think, once the technique has been learned. This is how people like Corey Taylor of Slipknot or Jonathan Davis of Korn have distorted voices that are unbreakable at 50. So, in addition to the body decaying after a certain age, technique has a huge influence on the voice. If some rock stars abused their voices in their youth, it is possible that many years later they can no longer find those notes, that they have lost them forever. On colossal tours singers often use cortisone to fight inflammation, lesions or polyps of the vocal cords and go on stage, but these solutions are equivalent to making a footballer run every Sunday with his knees in pieces: in the long run these are things that they are paid.
The most dignified solution, both for yourself and for your audience, probably lies in accepting your new voice and adapting your music to what you are capable of doing, like the aforementioned Plant enjoying the theaters and the affection of his audience by singing new music more in line with his taste, or finding new life in the voice of the elderly, as Johnny Cash taught us by recording his masterpieces with Rick Rubin. Certainly better than pretending to be in your twenties when you're no longer one and risk ruining even the memory of the past with depressing performances that don't respect your talent or the loyalty of your fans.