When I was a long-haired teenager, going to rock concerts was among my favorite things to do (I admit it, I grew up in Wayne’s World). But my concert attendance has slipped since then – these days, I’m lucky if I see one show a year. Well, this year I decided to change that.
Shortly after my ugly surgery I saw Green Day on their American Idiot tour, and that was a great show. This weekend I’m going to a Sevendust concert, and a week from now I’ll see Wilco (I’m really looking forward to that one). And I plan to see several more before the year’s end.
But as much as I know I’ll enjoy these shows, they’ll probably pale in comparison to the time I took my son to see Rush. He was just a hair shy of five years old at the time, and we both had a blast. That was the first time I got to really share something with him that I liked, and it was great to see him enjoying it, too. Yeah, I know – he was a bit young to see a rock concert. But I figure popular culture will try to corrupt him with soulless pop songs performed by surgically-enhanced celebrities, so I might as well get him started on the right foot by taking him to a show where the musicians write their own songs and play their own instruments.
Sevendust!!! OMG, I have never had a chance to see them but I want to really bad! I’m officially jealous ;-)
Oh well, at least I get to go see Korn and Mudvayne this weekend!
With Rush, when you say “where the musicians write their own songs” you gotta add the qualifier “in something other than 4/4 time and the key of C”. I was trying to teach myself some of their stuff and came across a passage that, in the space of just five or six measures, changed time signatures 3 times(one of them was 5/8, not exactly a standard time) and keys at least twice!
Believe it or not, I used to play Rush on the piano when I was a teenager, so I know exactly what you mean! It was great practice, but I have to admit that YYZ just doesn’t have the same punch when played on the piano :)
On Halloween in 1998, Sevendust played an amazing show at my bar in Des Moines, IA. There was barely room to move in a space crammed with about 600 people where there should have been no more than 450 and they sounded phenominal. This was shortly after their first album went platinum. To this day, I avoid seeing shows in venues meant for more than about 1000 people because I feel like there’s a certain intimacy missing from the arena rock show. I think Rush would probably be one of the few exceptions to that, although seeing them in a club would be killer.
5 Sounds like a good age to start taking kids to rock concerts, at the very least they will see that not all bands lipsync and that good bands still play real instruments. Sounds like we have another rocker amongst our midst, and that is a good thing ;)
critter42: I’m curious now as to which song this was. I want to listen to it and see if I can spot the passage… :-)