Man, It's Hard Being Gen X Right Now
The music, the memories, and the legends we're losing along the way.
I woke up this morning with a realization.
Man, it's hard being Gen X right now.
Seriously. Have you looked at how many of the musicians we grew up loving we've lost this year? And the year isn't even over.
It seems like every few weeks, sometimes every few days, another familiar name appears in the headlines. Another singer. Another guitarist. Another songwriter. Another voice that helped create the soundtrack of our lives.
And every time, there's that little moment.
Oh, man. Not another one.
Now, I'm not comparing this to losing a family member or someone we loved personally. That's a different kind of grief. But there's something about losing the musicians we grew up with that hits in a way that's difficult to explain.
Because when they go, something else goes with them.
A little piece of our youth.
And sometimes we don't realize how much of ourselves we've attached to their music until they're gone.
Another Voice Goes Silent
2026 has been rough.
We've said goodbye to musicians like Bob Weir, Neil Sedaka, Chuck Negron, and so many others. Artists whose careers crossed decades, genres, and generations.
And now Donnie Iris.
Some of these losses hit us harder than others. Not necessarily because one musician was more talented or important than another, but because of where their music lived in our lives.
Maybe it was a song you danced to at your first school party.
Maybe it was playing on the radio when you fell in love.
Maybe it was the record you listened to when your heart got broken.
Or maybe it was simply one of those songs that made you turn up the volume every single time it came on.
Music has a funny way of doing that. It attaches itself to moments, people, and places, then quietly waits decades for us to press play again.
And suddenly, we're fifteen.
Or seventeen.
Or twenty-two.
For a few minutes, we're right back there.
Two Songs and Forty-Five Years
Yesterday, I wrote a remembrance of Donnie Iris, who passed away on October 26 at the age of 83.
For forty-five years, I've loved two of his songs: "Ah! Leah!" and "Love Is Like a Rock."
I mean, really loved them.
They weren't songs I occasionally stumbled across and thought, Oh, that's nice.
They were songs that stayed in my musical rotation for decades. Songs I still played regularly. Songs that made me smile because I remembered exactly why I'd fallen in love with them in the first place.
But here's the strange part.
For someone who has spent most of her life exploring music, researching musicians, following bands, and connecting the dots between artists, I never really explored Donnie Iris.
I knew the songs.
I loved the voice.
I appreciated the music.
But I didn't know the man behind it.
Until yesterday.
And wow, did I discover some things.
The Jaggerz. "The Rapper." Wild Cherry. Mark Avsec. Donnie Iris and the Cruisers.
Wait a minute.
Wild Cherry?
As in "Play That Funky Music," Wild Cherry?
Now, THAT took me somewhere.
I remembered my older siblings dancing and singing along to that song when I was little. I remembered my brother Ric playing it one day and announcing, almost as an afterthought, "And these guys are white!"
You have to understand the musical world we were growing up in. There were divisions between Black music and white music, particularly in the expectations surrounding what people listened to and who was supposed to be making it.
And here came these guys with a funk record that had everybody dancing.
It was wonderful.
And now, nearly fifty years later, I'm discovering that Donnie Iris joined Wild Cherry after their big hit and met Mark Avsec there, a connection that eventually helped lead to the Cruisers.
Are you kidding me?
How did I miss all this?
I followed Ritchie Blackmore's musical journey. I discovered connections between Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Asia. I've spent years following musicians from one band to another, discovering collaborations and finding new music along the way.
But somehow, Donnie Iris remained the guy with those two really cool songs.
And suddenly, after his passing, I was doing what I'd done throughout my youth.
Following the music.
Listening to the Jaggerz. Revisiting Wild Cherry. Exploring recordings and discovering the depth of a career I'd barely scratched the surface of.
Only this time, I wasn't remembering a musical discovery I'd made forty years ago.
I was making that discovery right now.
And that made this experience different.
Then I Saw the Video
This morning, while scrolling through my reels, I came across footage from Donnie Iris's final concert in Pittsburgh on September 28, 2026.
He was sitting in a chair.
And he was singing.
His last performance.
Now, I've been a singer. I understand something about the physical and emotional commitment it takes to deliver a song. The breath, the control, the energy, the feeling.
And what I saw in that video stopped me.
Donnie wasn't standing onstage the way he had when he was younger. He wasn't moving around, commanding the stage with his body.
He was sitting.
But man, was he performing.
The voice. The emotion. The passion.
Everything he had was coming through that microphone.
I watched it again.
And again.
And again.
And I wondered.
Did he know?
Did he know this was going to be his last performance? Did he know how little time he had left?
Then I started reading.
Donnie had been battling bladder cancer for three years. According to reporting from Pittsburgh, he'd undergone radiation treatment that very afternoon. His longtime friend and musical partner, Mark Avsec, described how difficult things had become physically and how much Donnie wanted to perform for his audience.
He announced his retirement on October 9, calling that final hometown concert a meaningful way to close his performing career.
Seventeen days later, he was gone.
And suddenly, that video became something much bigger to me.
Here was a man who had spent a lifetime making music, sitting in a chair, giving everything he had to the people who had loved him for decades.
I don't know whether he understood that the end was so close.
But watching him, knowing what we know now, it felt like goodbye.
A lifetime of passion in one performance.
And what a gift that was.
Not Everyone Gets a Last Encore
I've been fortunate enough to see some remarkable musicians perform.
I saw Rush before Neil Peart passed away.
I remember watching artists like Ozzy Osbourne reach the final chapters of their performing lives.
And then I think about Prince. Tom Petty. The musicians who were still creating, still performing, still very much part of our musical world when time ran out.
Not everyone gets the opportunity to say goodbye.
Sometimes the final concert is just another concert. Nobody knows what's coming. The fans go home, the lights go out, and everyone assumes there will be another show.
Until there isn't.
And that's what makes Donnie's final performance so extraordinary to me.
He had the opportunity to stand, or in this case sit, before the people who loved his music and give them one more performance.
One more opportunity to share what he'd spent his life creating.
As musicians grow older, there's something beautiful about passing the baton to younger artists. Every generation deserves its chance to create its own musical history.
And no, I'm not going to launch into some speech about how today's musicians aren't as good as the ones we grew up with.
That's nonsense.
Musicianship changes. Technology changes. The way music is created, recorded, performed, and shared changes.
It was different for our parents when our music arrived, just as it's different for us watching today's musical world evolve.
Not better. Not worse.
Different.
But the musicians who shaped our generation developed their craft in a particular world, and we're watching many of those remarkable people reach the ends of their journeys.
And that hurts.
More Than a Couple of Hits
Something else struck me while reading about Donnie Iris.
Pittsburgh loved this man.
Not simply because he had national hits decades ago.
Because he was theirs.
I saw photographs of him in Steelers jerseys, attending sporting events, showing up around the community, and celebrating the place he called home.
I read the remembrances from local musicians, friends, and people who'd followed him for years.
To much of the world, Donnie Iris might have been the guy who sang "Ah! Leah!"
To Pittsburgh, he was something much more.
A neighbor. A hometown hero. A familiar face. Someone whose music had become part of the city's identity.
And I found that incredibly touching.
Because there's a difference between being famous and being loved.
And the community that loved Donnie Iris was there for him, just as he'd been there for them.
When I think about that final concert now, I don't just see a musician performing.
I see a man surrounded by the community that helped carry his music through a lifetime.
And I see what it means to leave behind something that matters.
The Soundtrack of Being Young
Maybe this is the part of getting older nobody really prepares you for.
We know our favorite musicians aren't going to live forever.
Of course we know that.
But knowing it and waking up repeatedly to another announcement are two very different things.
Because these people weren't just names on album covers.
They were there.
They were there when we were young and foolish.
When we were falling in love.
When we were getting our hearts broken.
When we were dancing in living rooms, cruising around with friends, hanging out at bowling alleys, and spending every spare dollar on records.
They were there during the good times.
And they were there during the bad times.
Some of those songs helped us celebrate life.
Others helped us survive it.
And now, one by one, the people who made them are leaving us.
The music remains, of course.
I can still play Prince. I can still listen to Tom Petty. I can still turn up Rush until somebody complains about the volume.
And trust me, I will.
But something changes when the person who made that music is no longer here.
It's a reminder that the world we grew up in is slowly becoming history.
And that we're getting older right along with it.
Ugh.
Who signed us up for this?
It's the Remembering
I've spent a lot of time today thinking about why Donnie Iris's passing affected me the way it did.
I didn't know him.
I never met him.
I didn't even know nearly as much about his career as I wish I had.
But I knew his music.
And yesterday, I discovered the musician.
Today, I watched him give what would become his final performance.
And somehow, those two experiences brought me face-to-face with something I've been feeling all year.
It's not just about losing the legends.
It's about remembering what they gave us.
The songs. The concerts. The discoveries. The friendships. The memories.
All those moments that became part of who we are.
And the remarkable thing is that even now, after all these years, the music can still surprise us.
I discovered more about Donnie Iris in the last two days than I had in the previous forty-five years.
I found new reasons to appreciate music I'd already loved.
And I was reminded that a musician's legacy is so much bigger than a chart position or the number of records sold.
Sometimes it's a song that stays with a little girl for the rest of her life.
Sometimes it's a city mourning one of its own.
And sometimes it's an aging singer, sitting in a chair, pouring his heart into one last performance.
There will be more losses.
We know that.
Some will hit harder than others, and each of us will have our own reasons why.
But I hope we keep remembering.
I hope we keep sharing the stories, playing the records, exploring the music, and telling the younger generations why these artists mattered to us.
Because we were there.
We heard that music when it was new.
We lived our lives with it.
And what an extraordinary soundtrack we had.
So here's to the musicians who gave us their talent, their passion, and so much of their lives.
And here's to all of us who are still listening.
Yeah.
It's hard being Gen X right now.
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. Which musician's passing has hit you particularly hard? What song takes you straight back to your youth? And have you ever discovered an artist's incredible musical history only after they were gone?
Share your memories in the comments. That's what Rock ’n’ Roll Angel is all about.
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Website: DrAYHeath.com
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Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming.
And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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