Talkin’ ‘Bout Degeneration

Pete Townshend was 20 when he wrote “hope I die before I get old” and 37 when he sang “can’t pretend that growing older never hurts.”

If Townshend and his mates in the Who can match Peter, Paul & Mary in bringing spirit, dedication and mutual affection to a concert, they should be all right when their “Quadrophenia”reunion tour plays Los Angeles and Anaheim next month.

But, as admirable as Peter, Paul & Mary’s performance was Friday--the first of two sold-out nights at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--one couldn’t help recalling Townshend’s wistful words.

Listening to Mary Travers’ diminished voice, noting how far she and partners Noel Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow are today from recapturing the dynamic, dramatic and far-ranging flights of harmony they took as the most popular group of the ‘60s folk boom, it was impossible to pretend that growing older never hurts.

They certainly didn’t pretend. Now that George Burns is gone, the soon-to-be-sexagenarian folk trio is a contender for the league lead in the number of wry references to the aging process made per performance.

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Travers’ purity of voice is a memory, replaced by a nasal, pinched, grainy, sometimes almost crone-like tone that makes one think of another noble wreck from the ‘60s, Marianne Faithfull. Travers’ pitch remains good but with range diminished, there were a few moments when she tried to compensate for her inability to soar by adding extra oomph. The result wasn’t power, but harshness and glare.

Still, she had good moments with songs that called for a voice of experience rather than the airs of a sweet ingenue. Among them were the dark, troubled folk song “Wayfaring Stranger,” the Pete Seeger antiwar lament “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and a less famous song, “Geraldine and Ruthie May,” that sorrowfully traces the wanderings of two elderly bag ladies.

Stookey (the tall one) remains a reasonably pliant and clear-voiced singer. The bespectacled, round-shouldered Yarrow--whose look has turned the bend past avuncular and is closing fast on grandfatherly--doesn’t have a powerhouse voice, but he mustered plenty of folksy warmth.

Stookey and Yarrow are capable guitar pickers, and Paul Prestopino’s array of stringed instruments--banjo, mandolin, guitar and lap slide guitar--filled out the sound with some accomplished, sweet licks. Dick Kniss, a PP&M; sidekick on upright bass since the ‘60s, generally had too little presence in the sound mix to make an impact.

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You probably won’t hear so many getting-older jokes in performances by some of PP&M;’s luckier contemporaries--Judy Collins, Odetta, Etta James, George Jones and Willie Nelson, for example--who retain most of what they once had vocally. In a stand-up comedy segment centered on being a grandma, a mother-in-law (to a Republican, yet) and an “antique,” Travers even confessed to having been born in 1936, a year earlier than the reference books have it. An end to fibbing is one sure sign that a person has accepted the inevitability of aging.

But more than the calendar has turned against Peter, Paul & Mary.

Introducing a strong, fervent, set-closing version of Bob Dylan’s protest anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Travers said, “In these troubled times, it’s important to rededicate ourselves when we sing it.” Indeed, the times must seem troubled to ‘60s liberal activists who sang to set the world a-right, only to find, 30 years on, that the times have a-changed in ways they never wanted: The world has been set so far to the right that old-line liberalism no longer has a voice in a presidential campaign.

But Peter, Paul & Mary weren’t about to wallow in defeat. Stookey’s solo number, “Virtual Party,” found him having a good time and an up-to-date chuckle over the relationship quirks of the online present (the lyric “I spend so much time saving time/That I don’t have any time to spend” got a laugh of recognition from the boomers-and-up crowd).

Introducing the gently determined blues-rag “No Easy Walk to Freedom,” which he wrote in the mid-’80s to protest South African apartheid, Yarrow was happy to point to at least one instance when political reality bent to his artistic intent. There certainly was no defeatism, or any sign of lost vitality, in the trio’s rousing, affirmative, high-energy version of “If I Had A Hammer.”

Whether singing standards like “Puff the Magic Dragon” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane” (two of the dozen Top 40 hits they had in the ‘60s) or weaving in such newer songs as “Home is Where the Heart Is,” a heartfelt, tragic ballad about a loving gay couple struck by AIDS, Stookey, Yarrow and Travers gave full respect to their material and invested themselves fully in performing it. No matter what the performer’s age or condition, that never hurts.