A chance encounter in the front row of a legacy rock show becomes a vivid meditation on how unguarded joy, shared experience, and generational crossover can momentarily cut through cynicism and restore faith in music – and in the future it still makes possible.
by guest writer Robert J. Binney
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Hope for the future. You discover it in the strangest of places.
Finding despair is easy. It’s everywhere – and too-well documented – but true hope appeared, full-throated and pogoing in two-toned loafers front and center at the arena rock show.
The band itself – who shall remain unnamed – was long past its sell-by date: half its founding members gone, a relic of another generation, hitting the reunion circuit every few years. Though the music remains sublime, it’s hard not to feel that performing it has become pantomime.
Over four decades ago, I saw them in a run-down Philadelphia football stadium and wondered, How can blokes that old prance about the stage? They were in their late thirties, after all.
The audience for such acts skews a certain way. Mostly pasty and paunchy – lots of belly-to-belly contact whilst shuffling across rows – and ignoring the (frankly foolish) edict to not be “that guy” in faded shirts from tours past. Twenty years ago, it was parents introducing their children to “real” music – you know, “the way it was meant to be played;” now, nests empty, they’re cashing in 401(k)s for VIP packages of drink tickets and souvenir laminates.
This far into the artist’s sunset, their fanbase has winnowed down to the most serious; even the fleece-vested tech bros are true blue, following the tour with the determination of Deadheads and the creature comforts of crypto apes.
The average age of Section A dropped at least a congressional term when hope, arms overflowing with merch – rolled posters, tour program – climbed over knees and dodged drinks to find the one empty seat, next to me, dead center. (If you can afford the second row, you can spring the eighteen bucks for a Modelo, but you damn sure don’t want some latecomer kicking it over). I assumed Dad was on the other side; no, this one was flying solo.
Fair-skinned, shaggy haired, sporting a zoot suit; not being sure if someone’s a boy or girl was a rock and roll staple (e.g., Lola, Holly from Miami F-L-A) before it became a political weapon. It matters not, of course, except for the purposes of storytelling; it’s nice to get pronouns correct. When the opening act’s singer – a local whose 15 minutes expired on the tails of grunge – asked where all the lovely ladies were at, nearby women replied with an equally-performative shout. My seatmate unleashed a howling roar.
We got a live one here.
She clapped, screamed, hooted and hollered along to songs she’d surely never heard: If the undercard’s job is to warm up the crowd, unfurl the “Mission Accomplished” banner.
This was my fifteenth time seeing the headliner, the woman in front of us was about to notch her 30th, going back to the pre-Watergate days. Between sets, I learned it was my seatmate’s first.
“Oh, I’ve been to other concerts. But not like this!”
So you’re a fan.
“Ohmigodyes! None of my friends listen to these guys, but…” Her logo-ed parka was a dead-nuts replica of a fifty-year-old album cover, itself the band’s homage to a bygone aesthetic. Several tours ago, the merch tent offered that jacket at $350 a pop; she’d DIYed hers with hockey tape.
She told us her dad had gone halfsies on the primo seat. Her giddy anticipation, reaching milk-and-cookies-next-to-stockings-hung-with-care optimism, set a high bar for a mercurial act whose performances can be hit or miss. I found her enthusiasm so pure, so contagious, I said a silent prayer to the rock gods.
They did not disappoint.
From the crashing ferocity of the opening power chords to the acoustic tenderness at night’s end, these self-proclaimed geezers still had something in the tank. Not the thunderous monster of years ago, but who is? At an age when most need to get dropped off at the curb, they were jigging and bopping and putting their comfortably-soled slip-ons through their paces.
And through it all, our new friend reveled without pause. She hopped in place right out of the gate, she screamed in ecstasy, she sang along with every lyric – not just the dad-rock chestnuts, but the side-two deep tracks from cut-out bin castoffs. Her reaction – a two-hour outpouring of elemental glee – was a joy so undiluted that she even knocked the band’s front man off his game, earning smiles from the stage and even a friendly wave from the petulant guitar player before his roof-raising climactic solo.
In perhaps the most Gen-Alpha move imaginable, she fretted before the set that she hadn’t refilled her FreeSip. Proper hydration won the day: When the canned wine kicked in, and a trophy wife in front went down, my seatmate effortlessly replaced her on the rail.
Audiences make or break a concert.
Bands hone setlists, tech and lighting cues are coordinated to the nanosecond; after tens of thousands of hours onstage with each other, even improvisation is mostly by-the-numbers. The wild card is the crowd. Transcendent performances can crash to the ground when those idiots behind you just won’t shut up, and what show has ever been improved by requesting “Free Bird?” Frivolity can quickly fester, as anyone who’s suffered Jack White’s disapproval knows – but to see an audience lift a band up, performer and patron raising each others’ spirits in a symbiotic snowballing of exaltation, is a night to behold.
This group, in particular, has a long history of practiced indifference – grudging recognition that concertgoers fund their lifestyles while not-so-silently suffering at the circus act of it all. The band that almost single-handedly coined the visual language of modern rock spectacle still feeling they have something important to say if only we’d all just shut up and pay attention. Hating how much they love the spotlight and loving how much they hate the grind.
This night, in this arena, this young woman reminded us all why we join together. The band sang to the wide-open spaces in our souls, and when the songs were over and the lights came up, there were tears, literal goddamned tears, in her eyes. She hugged those around her (soliciting permission, of course), just as we embraced her vitality and exuberance. When was the last time jaded old-timers had that honest a reaction, that emotional a connection, to a piece of art?
The songs may be cynical, the songwriter arrogant; society may be facing new threats, they’re no different than the old threats. They sing of crises both global and personal and claim that rock is dead – but how can we believe that, when hope just staked out her territory in the front row?
This was the band’s third-from-final stop on what they claim is their last-ever tour; I had a chance to cash in frequent flyer miles and catch curtain call, but what would be the point? This was a close-to-perfect coda, thanks to an anonymous enthusiast. I never caught her name – a rock ‘n’ roll vigilante, she disappeared in the exodus after dispensing hope to the wasteland. Listening to futility and despair resolve into cautious optimism; we saw, we felt, we were touched and healed. In her reflection, we found faith in something bigger. In the future. For one night, at least, a hint that the kids will be alright.
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Seattle-based screenwriter Robert J. Binney has written about Joe Strummer, James Bond, joyriding with the Salt Lake City police, and his relationship with President Jimmy Carter (though not all at once) for the Los Angeles Times and other fine publications. Most recently his fiction was published in Down & Out Books’ anthology The Killing Rain.
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