Hands Down

Concerts in your forties are funny. 

Ha-ha funny and arrow through the heart funny.

Getting out into crowds is about as fun for me as enduring a diatribe from someone about their political leanings when I simply say hello to them (either team by the way). This stands in stark contrast to 20+ years ago when I camped out for tickets, or drove a thousand miles to see a show. 

I loved crowds. 

Bring it on!

The more the merrier. 

They represented excitement, energy, possibility. 

"How's this night going to go?!" 

"Where am I sleeping?"

"Am I sleeping?"

The truth is that I rarely, if ever, asked such questions, because youth demands a leap of faith that disappears as we age. We just jumped and the net would appear, but the idea that we can do the same as we age is a concept so foreign to most of us, that to propose such an idea, would be considered as goofy as Galileo at a church social in the 1500's. 

Possibility is a word that many of us can't wrap our heads around anymore. 

It no longer equals what it did in the past. 

Now it seems to mean something completely different. 

Promotion. Career advancement.

But possibility never wanted to grow up. Possibility wanted to stay untethered. Possibility wanted to still steal off, concoct some nonsense reason why it couldn't go to work, and hope that it made it back in one piece. 

Two pieces or ten pieces were fine too. 

We treated possibility like royalty instead of something to be risk-assessed. 

And that's the gift of concerts. 

For a few moments, bookended by the crushing weight of adulthood, music pulls up in a DeLorean and tells you to get in. It's like the universe sprinkles a hodgepodge of people with water from the fountain of youth. All ages are present which is even cooler, but if it's a band from the days before life became "life or death," a special sort of magic happens when certain songs are played. Time melts, and the genie makes you twenty years younger, the notes and the lyrics landing in the ears of a person who isn't sure how old they are at that moment.  

Songs always have the power to do that to us, but live songs do something different; they cement them.

They infuse the lyrics with salt air, suffocating humidity, and an occasional breath of salvation from the sea. They sprinkle it with a kiss from your dream girl who's been your concert counterpart for the last sixteen years. They remind you that the song won't be perfect, and that's what's great about it. 

I can't be twenty years younger again, and I'm not 100% sure that I would if I could. Time demands our complete attention and our willful ignorance of its value. 

It's why youth never forced us to keep track, and why the world of the "grown up" demands a searching and fearless inventory with every tick.

It's why it lets us think that it's never going to end, and reminds us now that one day it most assuredly will.

Hands down, this is the best thing about live music. 

EO