Old People at Concerts

 

Last night my wife and I attended a concert and at intermission I went to the restroom. I was surprised at the sight: the women's room was nearly empty while both entrances to the men's room had lines ten deep. I said, "You've got to be shitting me, no lines to the women's and long lines for the men's?" To which one ahead of me shot back, "Yeah, look at the age of the guys waiting."

I've written in the past of the hope I draw from the energy young people bring to music from before they were born, but I want to celebrate too the opposite, the energy of old men and women to music they may have grown up with but is being played by people younger than themselves. This concert was one by the Allman Betts Family Revival, a rotating group of musicians made up of relations of Gregg Allman, Dickie Betts, Berry Oakley, and Butch Trucks. Other than a few geezers who played with Duane and Gregg while alive, the average age of the musicians was probably late 20s or early 30s. 

The music they played was pretty spot-on versions of original Allman Brothers tunes, sometimes a little harder rocking than the originals. Make no mistake, there were younger folks there too, but the bulk of the audience, and the ones making the most noise, were geezers like us who had seen the Brothers in their heyday. Now when I call us geezers, I am referring to an audience whose average age was probably 65, and whose younger selves would have looked down their noses at their balding, pudgy, finger-shaking, Indian-whistling, lite beer-sucking, trucker hat-shaking, snake-dancing elders for all that uncool behavior, but didn't give a fuck anymore. They were just digging the vibe of listening to music played by young people who understood its appeal and what it meant for them. 

Are they going to watch those videos they took on their phones at some future date? I think they're likelier to than most people who record concert moments. We wish we'd had that technology in our prime to waste. Were these old men wagging their fingers and shaking their cowboy hats trying to get in touch again with their younger selves, or were they touching something divine? I'm biased, but I think it is the latter. Enough people in wheelchairs were slithering and sliding to suggest, not their youth, but some liquid self that could still lay in all our futures. I don't doubt today there are lots more creaking bones and handfuls of ibuprofen going down instead of hangovers, but that we can still embarrass ourselves this well this late in our lives fills me with a kind of contentment maybe unique to our age and ability to appreciate.