I was born on May of 1978, a year that gave the world the FIFA World Cup in Argentina, the election of Pope John Paul II, disco, along with popular TV shows such as Dallas and Battlestar Galactica.
It was also a time when awesome music ruled the airwaves, with bands continually embarking on massive stadium tours.
You might say that I came along near the end of this era, although growing up in the 1980s, I had the opportunity to listen to so many classic artists and rock bands, many of whom were, for want of a better term, getting somewhat old at that time.
This included acts such as Queen, The Who, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, KISS, Journey, Iron Maiden, RATT, along with some great Canadian bands like April Wine, Trooper, Ian Thomas, and Triumph.
To this day, I still can’t get enough of these bands and singers. There are literally hundreds from that era that I have become acquainted with, embracing their music and the stories that they created making music and living often wild, decadent lives in a time when such behaviour was (in many ways, at least) more socially acceptable than it is now.
Sadly, many of those greats who were dominant for decades are either retiring or passing away. In December of 2023, KISS played its final show, with Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons deciding that it was time to hang up their guitars after 50 years in the biz. Myles Goodwyn, the legendary singer of April Wine (whose members came from Montreal and the Maritimes) died around that time as well.
On July 22 of this year, the world stopped turning when Ozzy Osbourne, the iconic frontman of Black Sabbath, died at the age of 76.
Few artists over the past five decades have made as much of an impact as Ozzy, who, in addition to his time with Black Sabbath, had a successful solo career throughout the 1980s and ‘90s.
George Jones, the country legend who passed in 2013, sang the 1985 hit ‘Who’s Gonna Fill Their Shoes.’
This is a very fitting question given that once these larger-than-life rock stars and country singers are gone, who will come along to replace them?
Unfortunately, looking at modern music, even though there are still a lot of great singers and bands, none of them seem to hold a candle to the artists and groups who were prevalent from the 1960s and into the ‘90s.
The music of these legends will carry on into the future, meaning that rock and roll will truly live forever.
