Face it, boomers: we’re starting to die off. And it ain’t just rockers who shot their hearts, minds and livers on earlier excesses. It’s more sober and seemingly steadfast fixtures like Mary Travers (72) and Henry Gibson (73), claimed by complications from chemo and cancer, respectively. 

Travers, the blonde sylph of Peter, Paul & Mary, got the bigger headline on the obituary page, and rightly so: She was what Debbie Harry was to punk music, the friendly and even seductive face (and voice) of folk music and by all accounts the real deal, a “Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and coffee houses that nourished the folk music revival,” William Grimes writes in the Times obit. 

Gibson was more like one of those cutouts standing behind the Beatles on the cover of Sgt Pepper, an unassuming figure whose parodic poems and halting delivery we used to imitate after Laugh-In. But I always think of him in Robert Altman’s movies, Nashville and especially The Long Goodbye. There he played the quack Dr. Verringer, who publicly humiliates the alcoholic writer Roger Wade (played to great effect by Sterling Hayden) in a cringe-inducing scene set at a beach party in Malibu (“Sign the check, Roger”).

Altman had a great talent for seeing what others didn’t in his actors; Gibson was known as a gentle flower child so the director cast him against type as villains, so his sweetness turned smarmy and even poisonous. And while it was difficult to imagine him as a country star, the nasty temperament behind his Nashville character’s upbeat patriotism resonates even today. 

As for the cancer, well it’s always something, as the lady said. Yesterday I heard Marianne Faithful singing Harry Nilsson’s “Don’t Forget Me” and was struck by this verse: “When we’re older and full of cancer/It doesn’t matter now, come on, get happy/’Cause nothing lasts forever/And I will always love you.” Nilsson died of heart failure (see rockers, above) while former junkie and Stones groupie Faithful keeps on ticking, miraculously. Go figure.