Getting old happens to the best of us, including rock stars.
If they don't die before they get old, chances are they're eventually going to look old,
too.
But some rock stars don't just look older as they age, they begin to look completely
different.
Since breaking out in the nineties,The Offspring's Dexter Holland has looked largely the same:
T-shirt, jeans, and spiky blonde hair.
Aside from a few extra pounds typical of getting older, he's kept his look consistent his entire
career.
But before The Offspring became a pop-punk household name, he actually sported a completely
different look.
Instead of short and spiky hair, he was crooning his tunes while sporting chest-length dreadlocks.
It was certainly an interesting look, but perhaps not the best idea.
Holland's hair was, quite simply, far too thin to successfully pull off the dread look.
He didn't look stylish so much as he looked like he had just stepped out of the shower
and hadn't yet begun to dry his hair.
But once Holland cut the dreads and embraced spiky gel, his band's sales never fully recovered.
Whether that had to do with his new do or not is up for debate, but why risk a good
thing by changing it?
Either way, spiky-haired Holland graces every bottle of his personal hot sauce, Gringo Bandito,
making his new signature look truly immortal, record sales or no.
Michael Stipe, lead singer of alt-rock giant R.E.M, has basically been three different
people throughout his career.
When the band began in the early eighties, Stipe had so much hair on his head.
His dark, curly locks came all the way down to his shoulders, and he rocked that look
pretty well.
But hair doesn't last forever, and Stipe's has gradually disappeared.
By 1987, when the band broke big, his hair was far shorter and beginning to thin.
It was the end of long, luxurious locks as he knew them, and by the early nineties he
was completely bald.
But no matter what graced his skull, he kept his face mostly smooth and clean-shaven, save
for the occasional scruff.
But no more!
Today's Michael Stipe, largely retired since R.E.M.'s split in 2011, has embraced his inner
Santa Claus.
He's grown a humongous bushy white beard while also keeping his head shorn.
That, plus a shiny new nose ring, should ensure Stipe remains as alternative and non-mainstream
as he was when he was topping the charts.
"I get a lot of, like, 'Hey, elf guy, Bill Murray, Skid Row Santa,' around this time
of year."
While Ozzy Osbourne's always been the Prince of Darkness, he didn't always look the part.
When he started out with blues-metal pioneers Black Sabbath, he looked like just about any
other longhair you'd find walking the streets of 1960s Birmingham, England.
He dressed in pleasant earth tones, rocked feathery brown hair, wore either no makeup
or just a hint of it for the stage, and had a laid-back, welcoming look in his eyes, even
though he did have some knuckle tattoos.
Fast-forward to today, and Ozzy has completely altered his look to reflect his legendary
reputation.
He has way more tattoos, and they're all super-cool and super-metal.
Just about everything he wears now is jet black.
He sports a ton of eyeliner to further make himself look spooky and evil.
Then, of course, there's the aging process, which in Ozzy's case actually works perfectly
for his on-stage character.
It's a lot easier to look like a harbinger of death when you're not terribly far away
from it yourself.
"I broke my neck in January, I had pneumonia, I had f---in' blood clots, I've had everything
this year."
Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards is a textbook example of what can happen if you
take rock 'n' roll excess to its logical extreme.
He doesn't look like an older version of himself so much as he looks like a completely different
human being.
This may surprise a lot of people, but Keith Richards actually did used to be young.
What's more, he also looked young, with smooth skin and hair that hadn't yet been affected
by years of drugs and alcohol use.
Decades later, that's obviously no longer the case.
Richards' wrinkles are deep, his eyes are sunken and tired, and while he still has plenty
of hair, it's not nearly as luxurious as it was in his sixties mop-top days.
It's not just simple aging, either.
Even in the early eighties, Stones frontman Mick Jagger still looked pretty young, while
Richards was already looking significantly older than 40, the age that both of them reached
in 1983.
Metallica frontman James Hetfield has aged fairly gracefully, but that doesn't change
how he could go back in time, stand next to his early eighties self, and nine out of ten
people would probably insist they were unrelated.
Like most eighties metalheads, Hetfield used to have super-long hair, though he didn't
tease it to death like his glammier counterparts.
He was also thinner and clean-shaven, not electing to grow a beard until later in the
decade.
Today's Hetfield has hair that's far shorter, not to mention extremely white.
He's definitely put on some weight, not to mention muscle, which is necessary to play
guitar as long and heavily as he has.
Plus, his facial hair makes his face look completely different from that of the crazy
young kid screaming out the songs from Kill 'Em All.
Perhaps even more jarring than the change in Hetfield's appearance, however, is the
change in his voice.
His signature gruff vocals are easily recognizable, but not so much on his early recordings.
In an early demo for "Hit The Lights," for example, his voice is thinner, his pitch is
higher, and his aggression is nearly at zero.
It doesn't fit the thrashing music behind him, and luckily for his band, and music history,
he altered course quickly.
In the late eighties and early nineties, Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose was on top of the
metal world, and he looked the part, too.
He had everything going for him physically.
He was thin, he had piercing eyes, and he rocked his long, red hair harder than just
about anyone.
Aside from his knack for fighting fans and onstage temper tantrums, there wasn't much
about Axl Rose that didn't scream "awesome."
But the years have not been kind to Mr. Rose.
His hair, while still fairly long, isn't nearly as red as it used to be, and his faded eyes
don't pierce the soul anymore so much as gently poke at it.
And like a lot of other people his age, he's gained a fair bit of weight.
Still, he looks better today than he did a few years ago, when he was even bigger and
sported facial hair that simply made him look messier than usual.
While he's looking better now, it's safe to say that the days of Axl Rose rocking booty
shorts to show off his toned, athletic legs are long past.
Bob Dylan is proof that facial hair can completely alter someone's appearance for the worse.
His sixties look is perhaps his most iconic, probably because that's when he became a musical
icon.
He was clean-shaven, with dark hair teased into a puff, looking every bit like the young,
hip, musical beat poet he was.
Several decades later, not a whole lot has changed, save for time obviously.
His hair is now a little greyer, certainly, but it's still fairly puffy.
He mostly dresses the same way, and his face looks about the same as it did way back when,
only with more lines.
And yet, he sometimes looks like a different person, and for one reason: that infamous
mustache.
Sometime in the nineties, Dylan began rocking some wispy lip hair.
It's often just two lines dripping diagonally down from his nostrils, and even that little
bit of fuzz changes his look drastically.
Whether the mustache looks good or not depends on the eye of the beholder, but he definitely
doesn't look the same.
That's probably the way he likes it, though.
After all, this is the same guy who keeps playing his own songs differently, so why
wouldn't he play with his looks the same way?
Legendary rock star Neil Young has never fit the stereotype of what most people would consider
the world's most attractive man.
That said, the years have certainly hit him hard and left us with what almost seems like
two distinctly different people.
Young Neil Young had a thin, scraggly look to him, with scraggly dark hair to match.
Old Neil Young, meanwhile, is still scraggly, though with a perhaps less flattering body
type.
His hair is now lighter and wispier, and it's complemented with big, white, bushy sideburns
that barely fit his face.
He's quite a bit heavier than he used to be, and his already-wrinkled face looks even older
thanks to his ever-present scowl.
In his case, it's fair to guess that the wrinkles probably aren't laugh lines.
Young's look isn't helped much by his choice of fashion.
He's always been a T-shirt-and-jeans kind of musician, but old flannel and wrinkled
shirts, not to mention the frayed guitar straps he regularly sports, give off the look of
a hobo rather than a rock star with decades of experience.
It's possible he looks this way on purpose, to give off as much of an everyman vibe as
possible, but that doesn't really work if hardly any man wants to look like him, though
maybe that's exactly what he's going for.
"What colorist did I have when I did that?"
"You had nice brown hair, it's beautiful.
You're a stud, man, absolutely."
Even someone who's dutifully followed Grace Slick's decades-long career from the beginning
would have trouble identifying her today.
She's retained virtually none of her famous appearance, and she couldn't care less if
anyone dislikes it.
Her look at the height of her fame was striking, to say the least.
Between her supermodel looks, dark black hair, and champion eyeliner game, it was near-impossible
to see her and not fall in love.
Fast-forward to 2019, and she's a completely different woman.
Her hair is white as snow, the makeup is minimal, and she's put on her fair share of weight.
She looks good, happy, and healthy, to be sure, but most certainly not like the "White
Rabbit" lady of yore.
The reason for such a drastic change is simple: she's retired and likes it that way.
Slick left music following a 1989 Jefferson Airplane reunion when she was 50.
According to her, that was the perfect age to retire because, as she once said,
"All rock-and-rollers over the age of 50 look stupid and should retire."
She was just as hilariously blunt when discussing her vegan lifestyle that she doesn't always
stick to strictly, as she told USA Today in 2001,
"If I see a big chocolate cake that is made with eggs, I'll have it."
She may not be willing to hit the stage and rock "Somebody To Love" anymore, but Grace
Slick is surely fun to be around at parties.
Linda Ronstadt became famous for her indelible voice and for looking a particular way.
At the height of her career, she garnered a reputation as one of the most beautiful
women in music.
Everything about her caught people's attention.
That, combined with her ability to expertly sing just about any style of music, whether
it be rock, country, jazz, opera, or even mariachi, earned her millions of dollars.
She was even so influential that by simply wearing roller skates, she could kick off
a national craze for skating.
But that was nothing compared to the craze for Ronstadt herself.
Her current look, however, is miles away from all that.
Much of that has to do with the naturalness of aging, and her haircut is now more a medium
bob instead of her classic long flow.
But without question, the biggest change with Ronstadt is her singing voice.
That is to say, she doesn't really have one anymore.
She's been retired since 2009, and a case of Parkinson's disease has completely robbed
her of the ability to sing.
As she told AARP in 2013,
"No one can sing with Parkinson's disease.
No matter how hard you try.
And in my case, I can't sing a note."
No one expects youthful looks to stick around forever, but losing such a powerful voice
is infinitely sadder.
"I'm lazy, so it's a good thing that I lounge.
So I'm glad to have the leisure time.
I have a huge stack of books that I need to read."
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