Taking son Ben to see the rock legends inspires reflections.
Stones bridge gap of generations
By Howard Goodman | Commentary
Keith Richards picked up an acoustic guitar. Played that familiar Middle Eastern-like intro.
Then Charlie Watts beat his tom-tom: dumm dumm dumm dum-dum, dumm dumm dumm dum-dum.
My son Ben sprang out of his seat, his fist high.
"Yes!!!"
It was Paint It Black, a song way up in the pantheon of his very favorites, and we were hearing it live, just the way it sounded decades back, hearing it from the guys who wrote it and put it on tape and therefore into radios and stereos and the deep-memory places of our brains.
And I felt an irrational wave of fatherly happiness and -- is this allowed when speaking about the Rolling Stones? -- satisfaction.
This was Sunday night two weeks ago, and we were at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, sitting toward the back of the arena in $200 seats to see the Rolling Stones. A father and teenage son on a splurge to see the living legends.
Legends I first saw 40 years ago.
Turn the time machine way back to 1966. Paint It Black was a radio hit. I was 17 and I thought rock 'n' roll not yet the universal musical idiom, was pretty dumb.
I looked down on Elvis Presley and Beatlemania. My tastes ran to folk and Broadway musicals.
The dirty, loud excitement of the Stones changed all that.
Now Ben, on the day before his 16th birthday, was seeing the group that turned me into a rock 'n' roll fan those many years ago. A fairly obsessed, record-collecting, concert-going, radio-listening, lyric-perusing, music-press-reading, mad-dancing fan.
Unlike me at his age, Ben is a serious rock music devotee. He's already collected memories of greats in concert: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull. He loves old quirky bands like the Velvet Underground, and new gutbucket bands he counts as personal discoveries: the Black Keys, the Hentchmen, the 22-20s.
This makes me unreasonably proud.
It feels good when your kid likes the same music you do. And to see that he understands why it mattered to you so much.
You expect that your kids will be hip to what's current: video games, cell phones, the Internet, Family Guy.
Yet you really treasure it when they appreciate the old: Casablanca, West Side Story, All the President's Men. James Bond. The Chicago Cubs.
Fathers used to pass on survival skills to their sons: how to hunt or fish, or build a house. In our tamer modern world, a father is more likely to pass on sensibility and attitude and taste.
So when my friend Michael the Attorney said we should surprise our boys with Stones tickets, he spoke to my sense of parental responsibility.
"Once in their life, they have to see the Rolling Stones," he said.
Just as, at least once in your life, you have to see Mount Rushmore.
The Stones weren't monuments when I saw them 40 years ago, on their fifth U.S. tour. The gatekeepers of culture were pretty sure that what they did wasn't even music.
They sneered. They were kind of ugly. Mick Jagger seemed like a gangly grad student trying look sexy
and not totally succeeding, banging a tambourine and dancing and braying.
"I see a red door and I want it to turn black ..."
The music was raw and dark and insistent. And giving in to the band and the crowd in Chicago's vast Arie Crown Theater, from a $7 seat in the last row, was way more fun than anything I'd ever been part of. The '60s took their dark turn before I saw the Stones again, in 1969 in Madison Square Garden. I was a college radical and the Stones were the dangerous figures of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, sorcerers who captured the zeitgeist of an America whose ghetto streets were burning, whose gunships were dropping napalm in Southeast Asia, whose idealistic leaders were assassinated.
No band was ever more urgent.
When I saw them next, in 1981 in Detroit, rock wasn't counterculture any more. And I wasn't, either.
Their show was a extravaganza of art direction and set design and celebrity worship. It was great theater, a good time. But the Stones were no longer central.
I didn't expect them to tell us what the era was about. They weren't breaking boundaries. They couldn't threaten the establishment. Kings of the concert business, they were the establishment.
Twenty-five years have passed since then, when they already were fighting against being a nostalgia act.
I kept my expectations low for this 2006 show. I was just hoping the aging Stones wouldn't creak too much and embarrass us oldsters.
I shouldn't have worried. In Sunrise they performed with more power and energy and high spirits than ought to be human.
"It's insane," Ben said as the Stones took their bows and left the stage. "They're like, the ideal of rock 'n' roll."
And then we were part of the exiting crowd that was singing "Woo, woo!" -- the background part in Sympathy for the Devil -- as we slowly filed out of the arena, a happy mass numbering thousands, young and old, who didn't want the good time to end.
Then Charlie Watts beat his tom-tom: dumm dumm dumm dum-dum, dumm dumm dumm dum-dum.
My son Ben sprang out of his seat, his fist high.
"Yes!!!"
It was Paint It Black, a song way up in the pantheon of his very favorites, and we were hearing it live, just the way it sounded decades back, hearing it from the guys who wrote it and put it on tape and therefore into radios and stereos and the deep-memory places of our brains.
And I felt an irrational wave of fatherly happiness and -- is this allowed when speaking about the Rolling Stones? -- satisfaction.
This was Sunday night two weeks ago, and we were at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise, sitting toward the back of the arena in $200 seats to see the Rolling Stones. A father and teenage son on a splurge to see the living legends.
Legends I first saw 40 years ago.
Turn the time machine way back to 1966. Paint It Black was a radio hit. I was 17 and I thought rock 'n' roll not yet the universal musical idiom, was pretty dumb.
I looked down on Elvis Presley and Beatlemania. My tastes ran to folk and Broadway musicals.
The dirty, loud excitement of the Stones changed all that.
Now Ben, on the day before his 16th birthday, was seeing the group that turned me into a rock 'n' roll fan those many years ago. A fairly obsessed, record-collecting, concert-going, radio-listening, lyric-perusing, music-press-reading, mad-dancing fan.
Unlike me at his age, Ben is a serious rock music devotee. He's already collected memories of greats in concert: Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Jethro Tull. He loves old quirky bands like the Velvet Underground, and new gutbucket bands he counts as personal discoveries: the Black Keys, the Hentchmen, the 22-20s.
This makes me unreasonably proud.
It feels good when your kid likes the same music you do. And to see that he understands why it mattered to you so much.
You expect that your kids will be hip to what's current: video games, cell phones, the Internet, Family Guy.
Yet you really treasure it when they appreciate the old: Casablanca, West Side Story, All the President's Men. James Bond. The Chicago Cubs.
Fathers used to pass on survival skills to their sons: how to hunt or fish, or build a house. In our tamer modern world, a father is more likely to pass on sensibility and attitude and taste.
So when my friend Michael the Attorney said we should surprise our boys with Stones tickets, he spoke to my sense of parental responsibility.
"Once in their life, they have to see the Rolling Stones," he said.
Just as, at least once in your life, you have to see Mount Rushmore.
The Stones weren't monuments when I saw them 40 years ago, on their fifth U.S. tour. The gatekeepers of culture were pretty sure that what they did wasn't even music.
They sneered. They were kind of ugly. Mick Jagger seemed like a gangly grad student trying look sexy
and not totally succeeding, banging a tambourine and dancing and braying.
"I see a red door and I want it to turn black ..."
The music was raw and dark and insistent. And giving in to the band and the crowd in Chicago's vast Arie Crown Theater, from a $7 seat in the last row, was way more fun than anything I'd ever been part of. The '60s took their dark turn before I saw the Stones again, in 1969 in Madison Square Garden. I was a college radical and the Stones were the dangerous figures of Street Fighting Man and Sympathy for the Devil, sorcerers who captured the zeitgeist of an America whose ghetto streets were burning, whose gunships were dropping napalm in Southeast Asia, whose idealistic leaders were assassinated.
No band was ever more urgent.
When I saw them next, in 1981 in Detroit, rock wasn't counterculture any more. And I wasn't, either.
Their show was a extravaganza of art direction and set design and celebrity worship. It was great theater, a good time. But the Stones were no longer central.
I didn't expect them to tell us what the era was about. They weren't breaking boundaries. They couldn't threaten the establishment. Kings of the concert business, they were the establishment.
Twenty-five years have passed since then, when they already were fighting against being a nostalgia act.
I kept my expectations low for this 2006 show. I was just hoping the aging Stones wouldn't creak too much and embarrass us oldsters.
I shouldn't have worried. In Sunrise they performed with more power and energy and high spirits than ought to be human.
"It's insane," Ben said as the Stones took their bows and left the stage. "They're like, the ideal of rock 'n' roll."
And then we were part of the exiting crowd that was singing "Woo, woo!" -- the background part in Sympathy for the Devil -- as we slowly filed out of the arena, a happy mass numbering thousands, young and old, who didn't want the good time to end.
No comments:
Post a Comment