Can’t you just imagine getting a bunch residents out on the dance floor while The Who or Rolling Stones are playing?

By Steve Moran

This Sunday morning I woke to this headline on the Drudge Report:

“Geezer Mega Rock Blow Out Planned for Fall; No Under 70 Will Perform…”

I am not quite sure I am down with the term “Geezer” but I have to admit the idea of a Coachella Music Festival-sized event where every performer is a senior really got my head spinning.  

Coachella Music Festival

The Coachella Valley Music Festival has been around since the 1990s and is held in the desert of southern California east of Palm Springs.  They have multiple styles of music and the festival runs over two consecutive weekends in April with the same acts playing both weekend.

Think Burning Man meets Woodstock, mashed up with pro football genre pricing. In 2015 the festival sold a whopping 198,000 tickets worth more than $84 million dollars setting new world records for number of tickets sold and the dollar value of those tickets.

I have been paying particular attention to this kind of thing ever since Lynne Katzmann and Cindy Longfellow of Juniper Communities proposed taking a bunch of seniors to Burning Man this fall. The Burning Man effort is well underway. You can read about it HERE. And . . . if you know someone who is at least 80 who wants to go they would love to have you there.

According to the article, the concert will include artists and groups like:

  • Paul McCartney

  • The Rolling Stones

  • The Who

  • Bob Dylan

  • Elton John

  • Roger Waters of Pink Floyd

If you are like me, you read those names and thought . . . I want to go do that. Now imagine for a minute that Argentum, LeadingAge or AHCA put together a big pavilion to tell the stories of our residents. Can’t you just imagine getting a bunch residents out on the dance floor while The Who or Rolling Stones are playing? Some in wheelchairs, some with walkers and some with canes. Others just shaking it like when they were teens or in their 20s.

I can just see getting some octogenarians to this thing.

This is a huge opportunity for the industry . . . for all the anti-ageism folks to tell a more accurate story about what aging does and can look like.

What do you think?