When Paul McCartney closed Live Aid in July of 1985, we thought he was rock's Grand Old Man. He was forty-three years old. As the forty years since have shown, he--and many others of his generation--were just getting started.

This was the time when live performance took over from records. The big names of the '60s and '70s exploited the Age of Spectacle that Live Aid had ushered in to enjoy the longest lap of honor in the history of humanity, continuing to go strong long after everyone else in the business had retired.

This is a story without precedent, a story in which Elton John plays a royal funeral, Mick Jagger gets a knighthood, Bob Dylan picks up a Nobel Prize, The Beatles become, if anything, bigger than The Beatles, and it's beginning to look as though all of the above will, thanks in a large part to technology, be playing in Las Vegas forever.