The best lines in No Country For Old Men are those in which the sheriff, played by Tommy Lee Jones, ruefully confesses that he had once expected Jesus to come into his life as he got older, but that this had never happened.

It's kind of the same way with myself and classical music. I imagined that by the time I turned 40 my listening would mainly consist of symphonies, concertos and string quartets, with perhaps the odd bit of jazz or world music thrown in for light relief. Dismissing rock music as a childish thing would be a proof of maturity, like developing a yen for golf, wine-tasting or the assembling of flat-pack furniture bought in suburban superstores.

Didn't work out like that. For the moment, myself and rock music are still shacked up together in spite of the people who wonder if I'm not a bit old to be listening to this kind of stuff. To which the answer is a resounding no.

I am, after all, only a child in comparison to the four artists who'll be playing the most fervently awaited gigs of the Irish summer. Neil Young, 62, Bruce Springsteen, 58, and Lou Reed, 65, are all old enough to be my father. And at a whopping 73 years of age, Leonard Cohen could even be my grandfather if we lived in some early-to-bed, early-to-wed Appalachian community.

These days, it's all the old dudes who carry the news. And when Neil Young sings, "Old man, take a look at my life; I'm a lot like you," the reasons for that are pretty obvious. At the very highest level of accomplishment, rock music is no country for young men.

The tickets for the Cohen, Young and Springsteen gigs sold out in a matter of minutes, and while the tickets for the Reed gig were slightly tardier in disappearing, it is still quite an achievement that anyone at all wants to see a live performance of the most misanthropic, misogynistic and miserable album in rock history. But they do -- I'm one of them.

What's interesting is that the crowds at these concerts will not comprise simply ageing hippies old enough to share a few childhood memories with the big four. If previous shows are anything to go by, quite a few of the spectators will not merely be much younger than the acts on stage, but much younger than the likes of myself. Young, Springsteen, Reed and Cohen appeal to quite a few people not born when these artists released their most famous works. You are, after all, talking about serious longevity here. I was two when After the Goldrush came out, four when Transformer emerged blinking into the light and a relatively grizzled seven when The Boss declared himself Born To Run. Songs of Leonard Cohen beat me into the world by a month and five days (and seems to be holding up the better of the two of us).

That the songs remain as powerful now as they were then says something about the profundity and brilliance of the work involved. Because things date. Take films, for example. Back in 1969, people were swearing that Midnight Cowboy was a masterpiece for the ages. In 1970, Airport was picking up multiple Oscar nominations and in 1973 The Sting was viewed as the height of sophistication, a position held two years later by Shampoo. It's almost impossible to watch any of those films now, unless you treat them as unintentional comedy. They are more dated than a Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton double bill. The great albums of those years, on the other hand, seem stronger with each passing year, new depths constantly becoming apparent in Reed's drone, Young's whine, Cohen's mumble and Springsteen's roar.

This gives the lie to that condescending notion that pop music can never be regarded as art, a canard most vividly illustrated in this country by the fact that Van Morrison has never been invited to join Aosdana. An organisation coming down with second-rate writers has no place for the man Paul Durcan, quite correctly, described as the greatest Irish poet since Kavanagh. And all because Van's poetry takes place to the accompaniment of guitar, bass and drum. Perhaps the honourable members of the clique may think about correcting this injustice when they've finished fighting the good fight for Cathal O Searcaigh.

Van's best albums, like those of his most talented contemporaries, help us expand our view of life the way all great art does. They might do so in a different way to a string quartet or a sonnet, but they do it all the same.

The one rock musician to whom the academic establishment does seem willing to grant some kind of status is Bob Dylan. And Dylan is, indeed, the proof that great rock music doesn't have to be concerned with youth. His run of albums over the past 10 years, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, is his best since his mid-Sixties heyday. In fact, he may be better now than he ever was. The protest songs of the Sixties are infinitely less complex and interesting than his current tales of alienation, mystery and growing old.

Dylan is emblematic because as rock music has got older -- half a century and counting, now --its masterworks have grown in strength and depth. The idea that the music is kid's stuff can only be held by someone who refuses to listen to it. Part of the appeal of Reed, Cohen, Young and Springsteen is that they are survivors, fully familiar with the harsher vicissitudes of life and willing to deal directly with them in a way that many of us find simultaneously cathartic and affirming.

Because, even though I'm going to see it in all its gory glory, I'd have to admit that Berlin is far from the best thing Lou Reed ever did. There's a lot more to him, too, than those brilliant tales of the New York sexual underworld that made his name initially. In fact, the greatest stuff Lou ever did were his Eighties albums, three in three years from 1983-1985, The Blue Mask, Legendary Hearts and New Sensations, which were about the situation he found himself in when the party stopped and he tried to work out what a relatively normal life would be like. As our own dizzy Tiger whirl begins to slow down and deposit casualties of the high life left, right and centre, that triad would make perfect listening in a lot of living rooms. No American novel of the time competes.

Similarly, if you want to get inside the madness of a great city in overdrive, don't bother wasting the

weeks it will take you to plough through Tom Wolfe's infinitely tedious Bonfire of the Vanities which merely reads like a several-hundred-page-long Vanity Fair article. Lou's New York album does it in under an hour. Though, of course, you'll have to listen to it a couple of dozen times to get the full effect. Which won't be any hardship.

Similarly, the way the Sixties dream turned sour in the States hasn't, to my mind, been captured anywhere so well as on Neil Young's harrowing mid-Seventies albums, On the Beach and Tonight's the Night. Listening to those albums, you realise that the miracle is not that Young and Reed are still performing but that they are still above ground. Reed's speed-crazed Seventies interviews with rock journalists still set the standard for rock-star paranoia and madness while The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese's great Seventies concert film, had to be retouched because a large lump of cocaine was seen hovering inside one of Young's nostrils during his performance.

What both men testify to is that you can come back from the edge and, better again, make something of the experiences that brought you there. That said, apparently the new, clean-and-sober Lou was regularly berated at New York Narcotics Anonymous meetings by reformed junkies who had used his music as a soundtrack to their chemical misadventures.

Even Springsteen, the most clean-living of the quartet, was unafraid to let genuine emotional pain bleed out on record. Tunnel of Love, his follow-up to Born in the USA, is a marriage-break-up album that is almost too close to the bone for anyone who has ever endured the horrors of a long-term relationship withering away on the vine.

As for Cohen, well he's always been the laureate of romantic and existential regret. The chorus of Anthem, "Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your sacred offering, there is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in," has got me through many a bad night. And I suspect I'm not alone in that.

The rock world, and particularly the Sixties milieu which these men all inhabited to some degree, is often described as macho. But the irony is that it produced so many unparalleled testaments to male sensitivity and vulnerability, so many proofs that it's not only women who bleed.

That's another reason the songs have not dated -- and if rock music was the fashionable flash in the pan derided by the high culture snobs, they would have. Instead the truth, honesty and intelligence of the songs have enabled very different generations to find meaning there.

In addition to complicated emotional lives, the quartet has individuality in common. Listen to those voices for a start. Springsteen is about the only one who'd be called up to sing at a pub karaoke night. The other three make do with voices which might have been designed by a creator determined to show that beauty of delivery wasn't a prerequisite for rock stardom. Cohen even makes a joke out of his limited pipes in Tower of Song when he croaks: "I was born like that, I had no choice. I was born with the gift of a golden voice."

Compared to Lou Reed, all the same, he's Pavarotti. Last year's Came So Far For Beauty, with Lou ostensibly covering Leonard's songs, showed that basically the ex Velvet Underground lead man now turns all songs into not just Lou Reed songs, but the same Lou Reed song, a kind of cross between Sweet Jane and Satellite of Love with the occasional, "bay-beh," thrown in for variety. It doesn't seem to matter.

They're mavericks in other ways too. In an era when rock singers are expected to sign up 100 per cent to the standard statement of liberal pieties, Cohen, Reed and Young are members of the awkward squad. Back in the Eighties, Young was declaring his admiration for Ronald Reagan and preaching a kind of agrarian conservatism which still resurfaces in him now and again. In the Seventies, Cohen travelled to Israel to entertain the home troops during the Yom Kippur War. And Reed attacked one of the great sacred left-wing cows when he went in with both feet on Yasser Arafat on the New York album, taking out Louis Farrakhan for good measure while he was at it. Springsteen may be the most right-on of the quartet but his stance is still ambiguous enough for both sides in the 1984 American presidential election to have claimed that Born In The USA was their kind of song.

One reason these singers have stood the test of time so well is that they combine staying power with precociousness. You'd have to take your hat off to men who could write All Tomorrows Parties when they were 23, After The Goldrush at the age of 24 and Thunder Road at 25. And if Cohen was a relative laggard, not getting round to Suzanne until he was 32, he did have a good excuse. By then he'd already knocked off three books of poetry and two well- received literary novels (as well as, one suspects, a few dozen attractive artistic Canadian women).

They were probably among the finest minds of their generation, which happened to be the golden one of rock music. It was a generation which had a faith in the power of music we'll never recapture. Perhaps these days, kids like that have returned to the novel or cinema, given rock's loss of cultural prestige. Certainly it's hard to see which of today's whizz-kids will be still doing good work in 30-odd years. The Arcade Fire have the talent and the intelligence; they just have to keep themselves lit for another three decades. PJ Harvey, perhaps. Beck? Bjork? Sufjan Stevens? Rufus Wainwright? Maybe, but the field does look a lot thinner than it did back in the glory days. Mind you, when the old timers are still so good, perhaps there's no need to worry.

The funny thing is that when I first started really listening to pop music, at that stage in my early teens when every new day brings a new discovery about just how much great stuff there's out there, Neil, Lou, Len and even Bruce were pretty much passe, written off as yesterday's men, derided as dinosaurs to an extent it's hard to imagine now.

Why so? Well, I'll put it this way. In 1975 Bruce brought out Born To Run and Neil brought out Tonight's The Night. It was also the year Dylan brought out Blood on the Tracks and Desire, Bob Marley brought out Natty Dread, Bowie did Young Americans, Roxy Music did Siren, Kraftwerk came out with Autobahn, Pink Floyd with Wish You Were Here. There were probably more great albums released that year than any other in the history of rock music.

Yet I don't know how many times I've sat down in front of the telly and seen a bunch of middle-aged lad-mag escapees explaining that the mid Seventies were the worst time ever for music, there was just nothing going on, etc etc. All of which ahistorical doomsaying is to pave the way for the next main segment of the programme during when one of the aforementioned pundits will go: "And then punk came along." Cue shots of lads spitting on each other in the Kings Road, a Jubilee parade, Joe and Mick, John and Sid and rubbish bags lying in the streets of English cities. Followed by some guff about punk giving rock music back to the ordinary geezer.

It was this idea of punk as a kind of Year Zero which meant that for most of the Seventies and Eighties a lot of the really great rock music was ignored -- something which paradoxically may explain the huge upsurge of interest in it now. I know myself that I didn't really listen to Neil Young till I was into my twenties, ditto Lou Reed, while I was in my thirties before I heard a Cohen album all the way through. The propaganda had put me off.

Yet, with each year the myth of what a golden age the punk era was has become more and more persistent, to the extent that the boosters of 1977 are now far more boring about that time than hippies ever were about the Sixties. The significance of punk has now become one of the sacred myths of popular culture and television's commissioning editors can't get enough of it.

Oddly, when you actually look at what punk produced, decent music is pretty thin on the ground. The Clash were great and half of the Sex Pistols album is pretty good but after that what did all this Jubilee Year fun produce? I mean, who in their right mind would now want to listen to more than two songs in a row by The Damned. Or anything at all by Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sham 69, The Adverts or any of the other bands lionised in interminable spreads about the goings on in the 100 club? On an Irish level, I'd personally prefer to listen to a country and Irish compilation, a really bad one with Magic and the Magic band, Jim Tobin and the Firehouse and Declan Nerney on it, than any Boomtown Rats album.

Yet the myth of punk creativity trundles on and no doubt our children will be greeted by the sight of Malcolm McLaren on screen explaining once more his masterplan to a nodding Paul Morley. I hope the kids will see through it quicker than I did. Because, born too late for punk, I gave my devotion to the kind of humourless soulless white boy indie music commemorated in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up And Start Again, a great book about awful bands. The whole pious death-cult surrounding Joy Division can't hide the fact that the band had about two decent songs -- though that did mean they had two more decent songs than their dire Eighties counterparts, whose lyrics about the hassles of being a pimp in Weimar Berlin were usually accompanied by a man playing the synth with one finger while another did the "help I'm trapped in a glass box" mime. Meanwhile, all the great music of the previous decades languished untouched by us hip kids, lured into the idea of pop as an eternal story of progress by Melody Maker and NME.

When Springsteen released Born In The USA, I was determined not to like it. That huge sound, those unapologetically sentimental and big-hearted lyrics seemed a bit corny, a bit rock and roll, a bit passe compared to the post punk bands I admired. But then I actually listened to Springsteen, which led me a few years later to the Freedom and Ragged Glory albums where Neil Young rocked as hard as Motorhead and the Pistols put together. I realised that there was a whole host of albums recorded long ago which would repay my attention better than any attempt to keep pace with an increasingly dodgy zeitgeist. And that old men sometimes have more to teach a young man than his contemporaries do.

Having enjoyed an Indian summer, four of the greatest songwriters who ever lived will shortly be enjoying an Irish one. We're blessed.

Classical music will have to wait.