CONCERT

                                                

Last night Pat and I went to a Fleetwood Mack concert down here in the retirement community we live in. It was quite a different experience because we do go to concerts back in Minnesota too but keep in mind back there, some people under age sixty-five attend too. I was drawn back to a concert fifty years ago that I attended in the twin cities when I was in my forties. I went home practically stoned because of the pot smoke cloud I was enveloped in and I wasn’t even a willing participant but I did enjoy the singing. The odor at the concert last night was far more subtle, being somewhere in between ‘Evening in Paris’ and ‘Ben Gay.’

For a time last night everybody just sat and enjoyed the band but then came a moment when we were all asked to standup and get with it, meaning the music. Now I remember a time when dancing was when you held your significant other and you tried to move with the music.  What was happening last night was more like---well let me put it this way. If you went out on the street and gyrated like that, I am sure someone would intervene and you would probably end up sitting on a couch someplace, talking to some bespectacled therapist with a clipboard in a white coat. At least anyway after all the usual physical ailments that could cause such jerking and twitching had been ruled out. Due to a sore back lately I could only do something that looked like I was thumbing a ride.

Music has changed dramatically over the ages and I’m not sure what really is music anymore. I used to like holding her, her head on my shoulder as we floated around the floor, she felt so good and smelled so nice. We could actually talk to each other in a normal voice. We could understand the words and hum along. Now in between the vocal outbursts and deep knee bends, pelvic thrusts and back bends the musicians do, they’re simultaneously physically assaulting a steel guitar or a set of drums. I do think they are more athletes then musicians and I applaud them for their dexterity and multi tasking.

Now to be fair there are people who can really sing, that still do sing and that is my cup of tea. People like Carrie Underwood and Josh Groban.  For me to pretend that I enjoy this other metallic mayhem that some people enjoy, would be disingenuous so I’m not going to go there. However I will state, that if some people do enjoy this, them more power to them and I believe that if you look hard enough you will find an amendment to the constitution that says to people like me, “butt out and go find something else to do”. Like writing an essay about how terrible our music is. I have tried hard during my life to listen to different forms of music saying maybe I would develop a taste for something other than the country western singers. True I did lose my wife, had a dog and a pickup truck, so I did once fit the mold. I tried once to listen to classical music like Mozart and Beethoven. I even bought some tapes but then one day on a long motor trip I feel asleep somewhere in Mozart’s sonata number 12 and ran of the road and hit a haystack so due to concerns for my well being, I quit that kick. Guess I’ll just watch for a while.